The second from the east is easy to overlook: plain stone, no decorative carving, no heraldic motif, nothing to catch the eye from a distance. What it has instead is a marginal inscription running in plain Latin script around its edges, carrying a quiet domestic record from the late seventeenth century that has survived in stone long after almost everything else about these two people has disappeared.

The slab measures 1.83 metres long and just under a metre wide, and its inscription was transcribed by a researcher named Brennan in the 1860s. A sketch Brennan produced at the time turned out to be misleading: the typeface used in the drawing suggested the lettering was in Black Letter, the dense Gothic script familiar from medieval manuscripts and printed books, when in fact the inscription on the stone is in plain Roman-style lettering, and the words are not laid out as Brennan's sketch implied. A translation published by Knowles in 1903 clarifies what the slab actually says. It records Bernard Kearney, a burgess of Fethard, meaning a freeman of the town with certain civic rights and standing, son of Maurice Kearney, also a burgess. Bernard died on the 27th of April 1682, aged thirty-eight. His wife, Catherine Kearney, born Dwyer, commissioned the stone and had it erected in 1687, five years after his death. The slab is unusual precisely because of what it lacks: no imagery, no flourish, just the bare facts of a life and a relationship, recorded in stone at a town already centuries old by the time Catherine Dwyer arranged for this to be made.