A recent video about obelisks on the Irish Aesthete YouTube channel (see (2) Follies Pt 1 – YouTube) served as a reminder of a cenotaph visited last year and located in County Mayo. This commemorates Maria Browne, née O’Donel, whose father Sir Neal O’Donel lived at Newport House elsewhere in the county. In 1797 she had married as his second wife Dodwell Browne, his unusual name being the surname of his paternal grandmother, who lived at Raheens. Maria Browne only lived until 1809, dying soon after arriving in Dublin whence she had gone for treatment of her illness. Her husband duly erected this monument to her memory, a tapering column that rises some 80 feet from a base to an ornamental urn. While rubble is used for the body of the monument, all four sides have quoins of cut limestone. A large plaque on the base written in old Irish may be translated as follows: ‘This is to your memory my friend. Oh my loyal beloved, gone forever, your presence forever lost to me’. Beneath, in English are the words ‘This cenotaph was built in memory of Maria O’Donel Browne, second daughter of Sir Neal O Donel.’ Above it a second plaque is inscribed ‘À Marie Et À L’Amour Par Son Cher Époux  Dodwell, 1809”. Further up again is an oval disc containing the deceased’s profile and her name. The opposite side features another plaque, this one proclaiming ‘To Gaiety and Innocence’. A blank space above it suggests that a further tribute inserted here has since been removed. Once part of the Raheen estate demesne, today the monument stands in the middle of a field. As for the house, the supposedly-moated Elizabethan property where Dodwell and Maria Browne lived was pulled down by their son and replaced with a classical building; it has been a ruin since at least the middle of the last century.