They are not in situ, which gives them an odd quality, somewhere between archive and monument, stones that have been saved rather than simply left.

One of the eight commemorates a William whose surname has been partially lost to time, only the fragment "tes" remaining legible, and who died in 1685. That date places him in the later decades of the seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Wicklow and across Ireland more broadly, when land ownership shifted dramatically following the Cromwellian settlements and the Restoration. Whether William belonged to a settler family or an older local one, his eroded surname keeps that question open. The survival of the stone at all, despite the damage to its inscription, suggests it was considered worth preserving when the decision was made to consolidate these eight markers along the wall.