The request is carved directly into the stone, a flat funerary slab roughly two metres long and tapering slightly from top to base, its inscription as plain and direct as a spoken plea.

The slab was recorded by the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister in 1913, who noted its dimensions and transcribed the inscription in full. Dated to around 1700, it commemorates William Burke and his wife Anne, whose surname Ward appears to have been an alias, a practice not uncommon in the period when families carried multiple names through inheritance, marriage, or custom. The Burke name itself had deep roots in Connacht, the family descending from the Anglo-Norman de Burgh line that became thoroughly Gaelicised over the medieval centuries. The church in which the slab rests has its own long history, the Dominican friary at Athenry having been founded in the thirteenth century, making this relatively modest late seventeenth-century slab a comparatively recent addition to a building already several hundred years old by the time it was laid.