It is an object that has moved around, or may have, and the uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting.

The plaque bears the arms of Sir George Lane, the 1st Viscount Lanesborough, who died in 1682 and gave his name to the town on the Shannon. Beneath the carving runs the family motto, INCONCVSSA VIRTUS, Latin for "unshaken virtue". Where the plaque spent its earlier life is a matter of some debate. One possibility, noted by Brewer in the 1820s, is that it originally sat on the family vault beneath the church. A second theory draws on an illustration published by Francis Grose in 1791, which appears to show it set into the recess above the entrance gateway to the graveyard. The church itself is a nineteenth-century building, so the plaque predates it considerably, and its presence on the west wall today is likely the result of at least one, and possibly two, relocations over the centuries. An armorial plaque, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially a carved stone panel displaying a family's heraldic coat of arms, typically used to mark ownership, commemorate the dead, or signal dynastic prestige. In this case it does something of all three, even if the building around it is not the one it was made for.