They lie where they were presumably always intended to lie, marking the resting places of people whose names were important enough, in their own time, to be cut in stone and placed within the walls of the church itself rather than out in the open ground.

Both slabs date from the seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Ireland, when land ownership, religious allegiance, and family survival were all precarious matters. One commemorates Richard Treswell, who died in 1672; the other belongs to the Ryves family and is dated 1647, a year that fell in the immediate aftermath of the 1641 rebellion and the subsequent Confederate Wars, when much of the island was in violent disorder. A graveslab of this type is essentially a horizontal memorial stone, laid flat over or near a burial rather than raised upright, and they were typically commissioned by families of some local standing. The church in which they survive, the medieval parish church of Finglas East, is itself a separate recorded monument, suggesting the building has its own long history into which these seventeenth-century commemorations were inserted. The notes were compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the record in August 2011.

Finglas is now firmly absorbed into the northern suburbs of Dublin city, and the church site sits within that urban landscape rather than in open countryside. Visitors looking for the slabs should head for the chancel area, specifically the south-east corner, where both stones are located. Chancels, the eastern section of a church traditionally reserved for the clergy and sometimes for privileged burials, were frequently where families of means sought to place their memorials, so the positioning here is entirely consistent with period practice. The inscriptions, if legible, are worth examining slowly; the language and formulae used on seventeenth-century Irish graveslabs often reveal something of the religious and cultural identity of the family concerned. Low light or a raking torch can help bring worn lettering into relief.