It was carved in 1698 to mark the burial of a man named Darby McMahon, the inscription cut directly into the stone, and for a time it was legible enough to be recorded. Now it cannot be found with any certainty.

The headstone was first noted in the early twentieth century by Fitzgerald, writing between 1900 and 1903, who recorded the incised inscription and the date. Nearly a century later, when the Clare Roots Society documented the graveyard inscriptions in 2008, they found that many of the stones across the site had weathered severely since Fitzgerald's day, their carved lettering worn to near-illegibility or gone entirely. This particular stone, dedicated to McMahon, was among those that could not be positively identified during that survey. The abbey itself is a medieval Augustinian foundation, and its graveyard accumulated centuries of burials long after the community dissolved; the 1698 date places McMahon's stone in the early decades of that post-monastic layering, when the site had already shifted from active religious house to burial ground in continued community use. The loss of his inscription is not dramatic, just the ordinary arithmetic of sandstone and rain and time, repeated across dozens of markers in the same enclosure.

What makes this particular record quietly affecting is the gap it exposes between documentation and survival. A name was carved, a name was copied down, and then the stone that carried both became indistinguishable from its neighbours. Darby McMahon exists now only in a footnote to a footnote, the physical object that was meant to preserve his name having outlasted the legibility of that name by an uncertain margin.