There are no decorative motifs, no carved angels or heraldic devices of the kind that frequently ornament late seventeenth-century memorial stonework. Just capital letters, arranged around the border and continuing in horizontal bands across the face of the slab, recording what the stone has to say with a kind of blunt efficiency.

What it has to say is this: two boys from the Cleare family of Milestown died within days of each other in December 1691. Thomas Cleare was eleven years old; his brother Edward was nine. The exact date of Edward's death is uncertain, the inscription itself ambiguous between the 21st and 22nd of the month. A third entry records the death of Tho Cleare of Kilburry on the 9th of January 1705. The slab measures 1.66 metres in length and 0.83 metres in width, substantial enough to accommodate all three inscriptions within a single rectangular limestone surface. The church itself occupies the fabric of the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, a building with considerably older bones than the seventeenth-century burials it now shelters. The Cleare family names associated with Milestown and Kilburry place them within the settled farming and landowning community of south Tipperary in the years immediately following the Williamite Wars, a period of considerable upheaval and population disruption across Ireland. Whether the deaths of the two boys within the same December were connected by illness or accident, the stone does not say. Historians who transcribed the inscription in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Brennan in the 1860s and later Long and Knowles, produced slightly varying readings, with Brennan's version containing errors that were repeated by a subsequent scholar before more careful transcriptions set the record straighter.