The year was 1646, well within the period of the Confederation of Kilkenny, when Catholic ecclesiastical life in Ireland existed in a complicated and often precarious space. That someone took the trouble to carve a formal Latin commemorative inscription and install it in a cut stone recess suggests a deliberate assertion of permanence, an insistence that this rebuilding be remembered.

The plaque sits within a rectangular recess measuring roughly 55 centimetres high and 43 centimetres wide, framed by cut limestone surrounds, and positioned above a narrow pointed doorway that was likely inserted during the same restoration campaign. The inscription, in raised lettering, reads: Haec ecclesia A R: Jacobo Wale eiusdem ecclesiae Rectore reedificata est 14 Avg. ano Do 1646, which translates broadly as "This church was rebuilt by the Reverend Jacob Wale, rector of the same church, on 14 August in the year of the Lord 1646." The text was transcribed by the historian William Carrigan in his 1905 work on the diocese of Ossory. The church itself is a 13th-century structure, so what Wale oversaw was not construction from nothing but a revival of an already centuries-old building, the plaque marking a second life rather than a first.