Wall monument, Carbury, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Religious Objects
At Carbury in County Kildare, a small cluster of early eighteenth-century memorials survives in and around the old church, connected to the Colley family. The group includes a mausoleum and three commemorative plaques, one of which has become entirely illegible with time, its inscription lost to weathering or age. The other two retain their Colley association and their dates, 1705 and 1710, placing them in the years immediately following the upheavals of the previous century.
The Colley family were a prominent Anglo-Irish dynasty with strong roots in County Kildare and County Meath. The name is perhaps better known in its later form, Wellesley, the family having adopted that spelling in the later eighteenth century. Arthur Wellesley, who became the Duke of Wellington and defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, was descended from this line, though the plaques at Carbury predate his birth by several decades. The 1705 plaque is mounted directly on the church wall, while the 1710 plaque sits inside the mausoleum alongside its now-silent companion, the illegible third stone. A mausoleum of this kind, a small freestanding funerary structure attached to or adjoining a church, was a common way for landed families of the period to assert continued presence and dynastic memory in a particular parish, even as their principal seats and influence shifted elsewhere.
