The letters, cut in bas relief, are now illegible; they have been effectively illegible since at least 1866, when a local historian noted the text was "almost totally defaced." What makes this fragment quietly arresting is not what you can read on it, but the long paper trail of people who recorded it before it faded, and the unresolved question of whether it even belongs to the bridge in which it currently sits.

The plaque dates to 1621 and was made by a sculptor who signed himself "Patricius Kearing," identified as Patrick O'Kerin, son of Walter O'Kerin and a member of the O'Kerin school of monumental sculpture active in the Ossory region during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The text, preserved through the notes of the antiquarian Thomas Dineley who visited in 1681, records that Ellyce Walsh, also known as Grace, erected a bridge over the Mulkear after the death of her husband Sir Edmund Walsh in 1618, asking passing travellers to pray for their souls. The plaque also carried the impaled arms of the Walsh and Grace families. By 1890 it was recorded as set into the battlements of the bridge; by 1907 it had been lowered and built into the parapet wall, likely when the bridge was widened, sometime around the 1770s based on Barry's account. There is a further complication: the present bridge is dated to around 1740 by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, though with earlier fabric, and researchers have argued that the plaque originally came from a different bridge altogether, one that stood upstream near the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Abington, which itself appears on the 1656 Down Survey map of Owneybeg barony. The stone for the plaque may have been quarried in the barony of Clanwilliam; the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 mentions marble quarries at Caherline and Ballyhobin as a possible source.

The bridge stands 170 metres south-south-east of the Cistercian abbey ruins, which are themselves worth seeking out in the same visit. The plaque sits midway along the west parapet wall and is visible from the road, though you will need to look closely; the bas-relief lettering is shallow and the surface has had four centuries of Irish weather working against it. Do not expect to read the inscription in situ. What you are really looking at is the ghost of a text, and the accumulated efforts of Dineley, Barry, Seymour, Lenihan, Simington, and O'Keeffe to pin it down before it disappeared entirely.