St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town contains one of the more quietly remarkable accumulations of medieval and early modern stonework in Ireland, with cross slabs, grave slabs, decorated stones, and three effigies spanning roughly seven centuries gathered within its walls. Among them, fixed to the north side of the chancel, is a limestone slab that repays close attention: nearly two metres long and almost a metre wide, it carries a neatly cut Roman-lettered inscription that records, in the blunt manner of its age, the life and connections of one Robert Leigh Colclough, who died on the 27th of May 1695.

The inscription is a small genealogical document in stone. Robert was the second son of John Leigh of Rathbride, a property in County Kildare, and his surname tells only half his story. He married Margaret, described as daughter and heiress of Sir Caesar Colclough of Tintern, a baronet of County Wexford, and it was presumably through this match that the Colclough name passed to him, or at least came to define how he was remembered. The Colcloughs of Tintern were a prominent Wexford family long associated with Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian foundation on the Hook Peninsula that had passed into Anglo-Norman settler hands after the dissolution of the monasteries. The slab itself sits within a cathedral whose stonework collection ranges from the tenth century onward, meaning that this late seventeenth-century memorial occupies one end of a very long continuum of commemorative craft, placed among grave slabs that predate it by half a millennium or more.

The chancel of St. Brigid's Cathedral is accessible to visitors, and the density of historic stonework there means it rewards slow looking rather than a quick pass through the building. The Leigh Colclough slab is on the north side of the chancel; the inscription, though aged, remains legible, and the formulaic Latin abbreviations of earlier medieval slabs give way here to plain vernacular English, a shift that itself reflects the changed world of late seventeenth-century Protestant Ireland.