It carries a coat of arms and a closely packed inscription that records, without ceremony, the deaths of five unnamed children, a Lord Mayor, and a young woman who did not live to see her fortieth year. The plaque is not in the nave, not above a grand tomb; it is in the lobby, the kind of transitional space people move through quickly without looking up.

The monument was erected by Mark Ranford, an alderman of the City of Dublin, and dated 1693. The inscription records that a vault beneath contains the bodies of his five children, along with Alderman Giles Mee, who died on 18 June 1691 at the age of sixty-three. Mee's death is noted with a particular detail: he was Lord Mayor of Dublin in that very year. The plaque also commemorates Mrs Mark Ranford, wife to the alderman, who died on 11 November 1693 aged thirty-six. The proximity of her death to the date on the plaque suggests Ranford may have commissioned the monument in direct response to losing her. An achievement of arms, meaning a heraldic display incorporating a coat of arms along with other elements such as a crest or mantling, sits above the inscription. The plaque is recorded in the Urban Survey of Dublin City and was documented in the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland between 1898 and 1900, which included a drawing by a Miss C. L. Long.

St James' Parish Church is on James's Street, a road most Dubliners associate with the Guinness brewery rather than with seventeenth-century civic memory. The plaque is inside the tower lobby, so access depends on the church being open; it is worth checking locally before making a specific journey. The inscription itself rewards slow reading. The spelling of "Lord Mayer" in the original text, the compressed grief of five children listed without names or ages, and the precision of the dates all give the stone an intimate quality that a grander memorial might not carry.