When researchers Bradley and Dunne examined them in 1992, they found the carved lettering so badly eroded that only isolated letters could still be made out, scattered across the stone surfaces like the last few words of a sentence being slowly swallowed. By the time the site was inspected again in June 2018, even that much could no longer be confirmed. The slabs, it seems, had become effectively unidentifiable.

Claregalway friary is a Franciscan foundation, established in the mid-thirteenth century, and its graveyard accumulated monuments across several centuries of continuous use. Seventeenth-century grave slabs of this kind were typically laid flat over burials and carved with the name of the deceased, sometimes alongside a date, a religious invocation, or the arms of the family. They were never especially robust against the Irish climate, and many across the country have reached a similar condition, the inscriptions retreating letter by letter over the generations until nothing legible remains. What makes these particular slabs notable is less their current condition than the gap between the two observations: decades apart, and the trajectory in that interval was only one direction.