Rather than lying flat as a memorial marker, the carved stone has been set upright and used as a blocking slab, sealing the entrance to a burial vault built against the eastern end of the church's southern wall. The slab still bears the coat of arms of the Hughes family, and though the inscription is worn and difficult to decipher, enough survives to make it quietly remarkable.

The text was recorded in 1882 by the antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin, who transcribed it as: "Here lyeth the body of Winefred Hughes wife to Captain Henry Hughes who deceased the 1st (?) day of March Anno Domini 1609. Here lyeth the body of Captain..." The sentence breaks off, the rest presumably lost to weathering or damage. Wood-Martin read the year as 1609, but closer examination suggests the date is more likely 1659, which would place Winefred Hughes's death in the mid-seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Connacht. The uncertainty around a single digit is a small thing, but it shifts the entire context of who these people were and when they lived. Captain Henry Hughes and his wife occupy a vault whose door is their own memorial stone, a practical and perhaps economical reuse of a commemorative object that says something about how the living arranged themselves around their dead in post-Reformation rural Ireland.