That act of restoration, quiet and collective, tells almost as much as the stone's inscription, which reads: 'Pray for the soules of John Linch fitch Geffrie fitch Dom of Gallway and Marey Linch fitch William his wife 1645.' The phrase 'fitz' or 'fitch' here is a rendering of the Anglo-Norman 'fitz', meaning 'son of', a naming convention common among the merchant and landowning families of medieval Connacht.

The stone commemorates members of the Lynch family, one of the powerful 'Tribes of Galway', the fourteen merchant families who dominated the town from the medieval period onward. John Lynch Fitz Geoffrey, named on the stone alongside his mother Mary Lynch, is thought to have commissioned the slab himself and placed it in the enclosure wall surrounding the holy well at Toberbrackan. A holy well enclosure of this kind was a common feature of the Irish landscape, a small walled precinct marking a spring considered sacred, often associated with a local saint and used for patterns, the traditional devotional gatherings held on a saint's feast day. The inscription was cut before John Lynch was transplanted to Lavally, suggesting it predates the upheavals of the Cromwellian period and the dispossessions that followed in the 1650s. Centuries later, Anthony Lynch, recorded as the last of the Lavally branch of the family, removed the inscribed slab to his garden. When he subsequently left Ireland, the local tenants carried it back to the well, to what they, as one account from 1914 puts it, 'considered its proper place.'

The stone rests against the southern wall of the well enclosure at Toberbrackan. Its survival in situ, after displacement and return, gives it a different quality from a monument that simply endured. The carving is described as high relief, meaning the lettering and decoration stand proud of the surface rather than being incised into it, which makes it worth examining closely if you do find yourself at the well.