A large stone slab rises from a moulded plinth and is topped by a three-arched canopy whose cornice spreads wide enough to support the great arch of the east window for most of its span. The arches are cusped, meaning their inner edges are cut into small pointed lobes in the Gothic manner, and the spandrels, the triangular spaces between the arches, are filled with leaves carved in low relief with some care. The whole thing is slender, almost compressed into its corner, yet the carving gives it a quiet authority.

The monument belongs to the MacNamara family of Ayle, and the inscriptions layered across it tell a story that stretches across several centuries. The oldest, running in raised Gothic letters around the cavetto, or hollow moulding, beneath the arch columns, is a Latin text recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the 1890s: it names Oid, son of Lorcan, son of Mahon MacNamara of Ara, and his wife Constina, who had the monument made. A simpler inscription on the plain slab beneath gives the date 1402. The monument did not remain untouched, however. A MacNamara armorial plaque, bearing the family's coat of arms, was placed on the back wall under the canopy, and a slab records that the monument was originally erected by one Mahon Daul McNemara and subsequently repaired by Captain Teige McNemara of Ranna in 1714. That repair inscription, noted by Ua Briain in 1908, adds an unusual layer to the object: it is a medieval tomb that was consciously maintained and claimed by later generations of the same family, three centuries after the original burial.

Quin Abbey itself is a Franciscan friary founded in the fifteenth century on the remains of an earlier Anglo-Norman castle, and the chancel where this monument sits remains largely intact. The monument is visible within the chancel, and the armorial plaque set into the back wall under the canopy is worth examining closely for the quality of its carving relative to the plainness of the slab below it.