Originally mounted above a chapel doorway as an armorial plaque, it was at some point removed from that position and repurposed as an ordinary headstone, planted upright in the ground among the graves. The inscription it carries, proclaiming the arms of a seventeenth-century knight and his wife, was never meant to mark a burial. It was meant to announce a family's status to anyone entering their private chapel.

When the antiquarian Seymour examined the slab in 1907, he found it standing close to the Barry wall monument in the same graveyard, and recorded its details with care, partly because the original surface was by then badly obscured. He relied on an earlier account by a traveller named Dyneley to fill in what could no longer be clearly read. The inscription, rendered in raised Roman lettering rather than the Old English script Dyneley had noted, reads: "THE ARMES OF SIR EDMUND WALSH KNIGHT AND HYS LADYE ELLYCE GRACE." The heraldic carving shows the Walsh arms impaling those of the Grace family, a convention in which a married couple's coats of arms are combined side by side on a single shield, and the crest depicts a swan sejant, meaning a swan shown seated. Dyneley recorded that the date 1619 appeared on the stone, and that it had originally sat above the door of the chapel associated with the Walsh family tomb. As for the material itself, the cut limestone used for the memorials at Abington was commonly described as marble by contemporaries. Researcher Loeber suggested in 1981 that it likely came from quarries in the barony of Clanwilliam, and the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 mentions marble quarries at Caherline and Ballyhobin that may well have supplied the stone.

The precise location of the plaque within the graveyard can no longer be confirmed. Seymour's 1907 account places it near the Barry wall monument, and that reference point may still help orient a visitor, though the graveyard has changed over the intervening century. The inscription itself is largely obscured, so anyone hoping to read it directly will find the record more legible in Seymour's transcription than on the stone. What remains visible, even so, is the outline of a carved shield that once announced dynastic alliance and has since been quietly absorbed into the ordinary landscape of the dead.