The tomb, a solid slab of mass-concrete measuring roughly 2.3 metres long and 1.9 metres wide, rises only about half a metre from the ground. On top sits a cross, and somewhere on its surface an inscription was once legible, though it has since worn beyond reading. What persists, in the absence of any recoverable text, is the oral tradition: that the tomb marks the resting place of a mother and her son, both said to have died of the black death.

The black death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that swept through Europe from the mid-fourteenth century, reached Ireland in 1348 and returned in successive waves over the following centuries. Burials associated with plague victims were often made apart from consecrated ground, partly out of fear of contagion and partly because the church sometimes refused rites to those who died too quickly for last sacraments to be administered. A solitary tomb in a field, remembered in local speech rather than inscribed in any parish record, fits a pattern seen elsewhere across rural Ireland, where individual or small-group burials outside the churchyard carry the weight of catastrophic or stigmatised death. Whether the mass-concrete construction here is a later monument placed over an older grave site, or a more recent commemoration of a long-held local belief, cannot be determined from what survives above ground. The inscription that might have answered such questions is now lost to weathering, leaving only the story itself as testimony.