The final digit of the date, somewhere in the 1620s, has been lost, leaving the memorial in a quiet state of incompletion that no amount of later scholarship has resolved.

The upper slab, measuring two metres by just over a metre, commemorates Dermot O'Halley and his wife Katherina Roche, also recorded as Rochester. The carving on its surface follows a programme that was well established in early seventeenth-century funerary stonework: a large wheel-cross, a form in which the arms are enclosed within a circle, here finished with fleur-de-lys terminals at each arm. The shaft beneath it runs plain and straight down to a calvary mount, the stepped base traditionally associated with the hill of the Crucifixion. On either side of the shaft, heater-shaped shields, so called because their outline resembles the flat-iron shape of a medieval shield, are left unadorned, which may indicate that heraldic carving was planned but never executed, or simply that a plainer style was preferred. Around the entire perimeter of the slab, a Latin inscription runs in raised lettering: 'Hic Jacet Dermicius O Halli Propria Cum Uxore Katherina Rocheecer Unt Fier Marmoris is Udopus Anno Domini 162?' The phrasing, though partially garbled or worn in transcription, identifies this as a tomb made of marble, commissioned by the couple themselves, and the missing final digit leaves the decade confirmed but the precise year permanently open.