It was carved as an armorial display, bearing the shield of the Butler family alongside the word 'Ormond', and it arrived at the graveyard as a kind of displaced relic, moved from somewhere older and more imposing.

The plaque is one of a pair, both originating from a structure recorded as Garrison Castle. At some point the two plaques were lifted from the castle and set into the external face of the graveyard's north wall, where they have remained as stone markers of a family whose influence across medieval and early modern Kilkenny was considerable. The Butlers, as Earls of Ormond, were among the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in Ireland, and armorial plaques of this kind served a pointed purpose: they announced ownership, lineage, and authority in a form that stone could preserve long after the buildings themselves fell silent. The word 'Ormond' cut into the plaque is not decoration but declaration.