It carries a coat of arms, the kind of thing you might expect to find above a castle gate or set into the facade of a grand house, not propped in a domestic interior. Its presence there is unexplained, its journey from wherever it began to wherever it ended up entirely undocumented.

The arms are thought to belong to Sir Francis Berkeley, an English planter who received Askeaton Castle as part of the Munster Plantation, the late sixteenth-century scheme by which the English Crown redistributed confiscated lands across Munster to settlers from England. Berkeley did not have an easy time of it. In 1598, during the Nine Years' War, he was besieged at Askeaton Castle, an episode recorded by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp in an 1902 paper published in the Journal of the Limerick Field Club. The plaque itself may once have been the centrepiece of a fireplace mantle, possibly within Askeaton Castle itself, though no evidence confirms this. An armorial chimneypiece would have been a typical way for a planter of Berkeley's standing to assert ownership and status in a newly acquired stronghold, so the theory is plausible, even if it remains speculation. The stone was formally reported to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in September 2012 by Tom Cassidy, Conservation Officer with Limerick County Council.

Ballinvirick House is a private residence, and the plaque is inside it, so there is no casual access. Askeaton itself, a few miles to the west, is more approachable and offers considerable context for anyone interested in the Berkeley connection. The castle ruins there are substantial, and the wider town preserves several layers of medieval and plantation-era history. For those interested in the plaque specifically, Westropp's 1902 article remains the primary source and is worth tracking down through a county library or archive.