What survives is the apron and shelf of a wall memorial, its incised gold capitals still legible, still insisting on a lineage that connects a man who died in a Midlands town in 1634 to one of the most celebrated military figures of the medieval world.

The inscription commemorates Sir Mathew De Renzi, born at Cullen in Germany in 1577, who died on 20 August 1634 at the age of 57. The text, though worn in places and idiosyncratic in its spelling, makes extraordinary claims on his behalf. De Renzi is described as a great traveller and a general linguist who kept correspondence with most nations in many weighty affairs, but what is most striking is the assertion about his origins: the memorial states he was descended from George Castriott, also known as Skanderbeg, the Albanian nobleman and military commander who fought more than 52 battles against the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century and became a celebrated symbol of Christian resistance across Europe. Whether De Renzi truly carried that bloodline or was simply making a rhetorically convenient claim, the monument was designed to announce it in durable stone and gold. The inscription also credits him with producing a grammar, dictionary, and chronicle in the Irish tongue, a significant contribution to early modern Irish language scholarship, a project which his son, Mathew De Renzi Esquire, completed and saw finished by 22 August 1635, just over a year after his father's death.

The fragment sits inside St Mary's, a nineteenth-century church, incorporated into the fabric of the building rather than displayed as a centrepiece. Its modest dimensions now give little sense of how imposing the original wall memorial must have been, though the surviving text is dense enough to reward a close reading.