Yet the inscription carved into this trapezoidal stone at An Gróbh, Co. Kerry, repays the effort, partly because it is bilingual, partly because it is in verse, and partly because even scholars who have spent considerable time with it cannot fully agree on what the Latin says.

The slab commemorates Stephen Rice, described as an esquire and a Knight of Parliament, who died on 1 February 1629, and his wife Ellin Trant, who had predeceased him by five years. The English portion of the inscription runs to eight lines of rhyming verse, recording that Stephen lived a virtuous life for four score years. The stone is capped by a coat of arms showing the Rice and Trant families impaled, that is, their heraldic shields combined side by side to represent a marriage. Below the English verse comes a further eight lines in Latin, composed in hexameters and pentameters, which is the classical metre used by Virgil and Ovid. It is here that the slab becomes genuinely puzzling. When Fitzgerald recorded it in 1911, he noted that the inscription was full of errors and that the earlier transcription in Smith's History of the County Kerry had given the date as 1622 rather than 1629, and had omitted the Latin section entirely. A scholar named J. R. Garstin attempted a careful reading of the Latin and found several words resistant to any satisfactory interpretation, including one sequence that seemed to require an invented word to scan correctly. The general sense, as far as it could be determined, was that Stephen Rice was the foremost or most senior member of an ancient lineage, that his fame would endure, and that the reader, addressed directly as lector amice, friendly reader, was invited to add their own prayers for the dead. By the time Bradley described the stone in 1987, the inscription had deteriorated further and was almost illegible, the slab measuring roughly 194 centimetres long and between 89 and 104 centimetres wide.

The stone lies approximately fourteen metres south-east of the south-east corner of the church, in the eastern portion of the graveyard, and is one of three medieval and post-medieval memorials surviving at the site. The fractures and imperfect re-cementing noted by Fitzgerald over a century ago remain part of what the slab looks like today, and the Latin, with its stubborn gaps and unresolved words, has never been fully resolved.