It bears the shield of the Butler family alongside the word "Ormond", and it arrived here not as a piece of graveyard ornament but as a salvaged fragment, lifted from somewhere else entirely and pressed into the fabric of a boundary wall for safekeeping, or simply to avoid its loss.

The plaque is one of a pair, both taken from a nearby structure known as Garrison Castle. Armorial plaques of this kind were typically carved in relief and fixed to the exterior of a castle or tower house to declare the ownership and rank of the family within. The Butlers, Earls of Ormond, were among the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in medieval Ireland, with their influence concentrated heavily across Kilkenny and Tipperary. The earldom of Ormond was created in 1328, and the Butlers held it through centuries of shifting political fortune. A carved shield bearing the Butler arms and the Ormond title would have served as a very deliberate statement of that authority, fixed in stone above a gate or doorway. When Garrison Castle fell into ruin or was demolished, these two plaques were evidently considered worth preserving, and at least one of them ended up reset into the graveyard wall, where it remains visible on the external face today.