They mark, or once marked, the burials beneath them, though precisely when they were laid there, and for whom, remains unknown. Their anonymity is part of what makes them quietly unsettling: grave slabs of this kind were typically carved with crosses, effigies, or inscriptions to identify the dead and solicit prayers from the living, yet these offer nothing of the sort. Nine slabs, nine silences.

The friary at Ardfert was a Franciscan foundation, part of a cluster of significant medieval religious sites in the town, which was for centuries an important ecclesiastical centre on the north Kerry coast. Franciscan friaries in Ireland were frequently used as burial grounds by local families of standing, and floor slabs of this type were a common way of marking a grave inside the church itself, placing the deceased as close as possible to the sacred space of the altar. Whether these particular slabs once bore decoration that has since worn smooth, or were always plain, is not something the surviving evidence answers. The survey that recorded them notes only that they are limestone, that there are nine of them, and that their date remains undetermined.