It measures just 41 centimetres high and 32 centimetres wide, yet it carries a careful piece of carved heraldry that has survived intact since the sixteenth century. That combination of modest scale and quiet persistence is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

The plaque is rectangular and carved in relief, meaning the design projects outward from the stone surface rather than being cut into it. At its centre is a heater-shaped shield, so called because its outline resembles the flat-iron shape of a medieval heater, a form commonly used in European heraldry from the thirteenth century onward. The shield bears ermines in chief, which in heraldic language means a field of small ermine spots occupying the upper third of the shield, with a saltire, a diagonal cross, positioned below. Whose arms these represent is not recorded in what has survived, but the style and execution place the plaque firmly in the sixteenth century, a period when Ardfert was still a functioning ecclesiastical centre of some importance, home to a cathedral and associated religious buildings that had served the Diocese of Kerry since the medieval period.