The upper layer is legible enough: an inscription asking prayers for John O'Dally and Marey Flanagane, dated 1682. But look more carefully and an older carving emerges beneath it, a Latin cross with rounded terminals set on a stepped base, its upper section encircled by a single incised line to form a wheeled cross. Someone in the seventeenth century did not commission a new slab; they reused an earlier one, cutting their memorial text directly over a design that may be considerably older.

Corcomroe itself is a Cistercian abbey, founded in the early thirteenth century in the Burren, that stark limestone landscape of north Clare where the rock seems to push through the thin soil in great pale sheets. The abbey's presbytery, the eastern section of the church reserved for the clergy, would have been among the most sacred spaces in the building, and the presence of burial slabs there reflects the prestige attached to interment close to the altar. The 1682 inscription for O'Dally and Flanagane is straightforward in its piety, following a formula common to post-Reformation Catholic memorial practice in Ireland. What makes this slab more interesting is the small wheeled cross added just above the inscription, slightly off-centre, with the letters INRI above it and IHS below, both abbreviations with deep roots in Christian iconography: INRI from the Latin title placed on the cross at the crucifixion, IHS a Greek-derived monogram for Jesus. These additions sit in careful relation to each other, suggesting the person who cut the 1682 text was working thoughtfully around, or perhaps in conscious dialogue with, the earlier imagery already present in the stone.