The stone itself is modest in size, just a metre in height above its concrete plinth and roughly half a metre wide, but the arithmetic of its inscriptions tells an odd story of reuse and reinvention.

The slab was first cut in 1644, decorated in the manner common to that period with a skull and crossbones framed within an ogee-shaped border, the ogee being a gentle S-curved arch frequently found on seventeenth-century funerary work in Ireland. Someone was buried, a stone was carved, and that, ordinarily, would be the end of it. But sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the slab was taken up and put to work again. The dates 1796 and 1812 were added to the face, meaning the stone served at least two further families or burials across those years. What prompted the reuse is not recorded. It may have been pragmatic, good stone being expensive and not always easy to come by, or it may reflect some continuing family connection to the original 1644 burial. Either way, the result is a single piece of limestone that spans nearly two centuries of the dead, each layer of inscription sitting alongside the last rather than replacing it.