The seventeenth-century armorial panel, bearing the arms of the White family and decorated with scroll work in raised relief on either side, has been in this location for over two centuries. But it did not begin its life here, and its presence is the result of demolition rather than intention.

The plaque was almost certainly a component of the White altar tomb, an elaborate funerary monument of the kind wealthy Catholic families commissioned to mark their status and secure prayers for their dead. It was originally installed in the White Mortuary Chapel attached to St. Mary's in Clonmel, a town with a long history of such private devotional spaces within or beside parish churches. When that chapel was pulled down in 1805, the armorial plaque was relocated to the church at Patrickswell, sometimes referred to as St. Patrick's Well, where it has remained ever since. The transfer preserved the piece from destruction, though it also severed the plaque from the tomb structure it once completed and from the Clonmel context that gave it its original meaning.

The church at Patrickswell is a medieval structure, and the White plaque now sits within it as a kind of displaced memorial, its carved heraldry marking a family connection to a building and a town some distance away. For anyone paying attention to the interior, it is a quietly odd detail: a fragment of a Clonmel monument commemorating a Clonmel family, lodged in a Tipperary rural church because the original building no longer exists.