But this one, tucked within a complex of ruined buildings at Templehouse Demesne in County Sligo, carries on its face two rectangular panels filled with Latin text, described by the nineteenth-century historian T. K. O'Rorke in 1878 as "three pious proverbs." The stone is damaged in places, yet its overall form remains legible: a flat top surface, a face that curves outward above the inscribed panels, and the panels themselves sitting side by side, formal and deliberate. Someone took considerable care over this.

The mantelpiece almost certainly came from a house on the same demesne, a structure dateable to 1627 and now itself reduced to ruins. That early seventeenth century was a period of significant transition in Irish domestic architecture, when the planter and Gaelic-revival gentry alike were investing in more elaborately fitted interiors, and carved stone chimney pieces were among the more visible expressions of that ambition. A mantel inscribed with Latin moral or religious sayings was not unusual in the period, but the survival of one, however displaced, is uncommon. O'Rorke's description of the text as "pious proverbs" suggests devotional rather than dynastic content, which sets it apart from the heraldic chimneypieces more commonly associated with the same era. The stone's dimensions, 1.2 metres wide, 0.4 metres tall, and 0.3 metres deep, give a sense of a piece that would have dominated a modest room, a daily presence above an active hearth rather than a ceremonial object.