It is not a public monument or a civic gesture. It is a private act of grief, raised on a private estate, and that combination of languages and registers, French devotion, Irish lineage, Georgian formality, gives it a quietly peculiar character that no single tradition quite accounts for.

The obelisk, built of mortared stone, was erected in 1809 by Dodwell Browne on what was then the estate of Raheens House, the principal seat of the Browne family. It was raised in memory of his wife, Maria, who is identified on the monument as the second daughter of Sir Neal O'Donel. The French inscription reads "A Maria et a l'amour par son cher epoux Dodwell 1809", which translates as "To Maria and to love, from her dear husband Dodwell", a dedication that sits closer to a love poem than to formal funerary convention. A cenotaph is a memorial erected somewhere other than the burial site of the person it commemorates, and that is precisely what Dodwell Browne built here, placing it not at a grave but on the grounds of the family estate, as though he wished her presence to remain in the landscape around the house. The carved profile of Maria's face in stone, the old Irish script invoking her O'Donel ancestry, and the French declaration of love together suggest a man assembling every available language to say something that none of them alone could carry.