" Below the coat of arms, a pair of initials flank each side, R.B. on the sinister and E.L. on the dexter, and a banner carries the Latin motto "DVM SPIRO SPERO", meaning "while I breathe, I hope." It is an unusually personal inscription, the kind of thing a man carves into stone when he wants to leave no doubt about who built a place and what he believed.

The circumstances surrounding that act of building give the plaque a certain poignancy. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which recorded landholdings in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars and Cromwellian conquest, noted that in 1640 Sir Richard Butler of Knocktopher in County Kilkenny, described in the survey's blunt official language as an "Irish Papist", had in Mauganstown "a stone house as yet not fully finished, the walls onely standing, built by Sr. Rich: Butler little before ye Rebellion." The rebellion referred to is the uprising of 1641, which engulfed much of Ireland in prolonged conflict. Butler was recorded as having been mid-construction when that world collapsed around him. The Down Survey, the great mid-seventeenth-century mapping project carried out under William Petty, also shows a house at approximately this location, suggesting that whatever Butler began was eventually completed on or near the same footprint. The plaque, dated 1643, was therefore fixed to a building still caught between ruin and resolution, its owner's defiant motto pressed into stone at the height of the turmoil.