That is, after all, what prostrate grave slabs were made for: set flush into the earth or the floor, they mark the dead beneath your feet rather than above your eyeline. This particular stone, measuring 1.8 metres long and 0.7 metres wide, carries an inscription that quietly accumulates loss across two decades of a single family.

The slab commemorates Ann Hutchinson, wife of Edward Hutchinson, who died on the 30th of November 1682. Carved alongside her name are those of two of their children: Mary, who died on the 24th of March 1675, and Thomas, who died on the 6th of December 1682, just days after his mother. The proximity of those two dates in 1682 suggests illness moving fast through a household, though the stone offers no explanation. A later addition to the inscription records Ezekiel Hutchinson, described as Esquire and brother to the above Edward Hutchinson of Knocklofty, who died on the 5th of January 1697 at the age of fifty-four. The Hutchinsons of Knocklofty were a landed family in County Tipperary, and the slab's careful notation of Ezekiel's age and status suggests someone who mattered in the local Protestant gentry. The use of "ye" for "the" is a familiar feature of seventeenth-century orthography, the letter thorn having been gradually replaced in print and stonework by the letter y, giving inscriptions of this period their distinctive archaic flavour.

The slab sits within St. Mary's church, and its location tucked into a porch angle means it occupies a threshold space, neither quite inside nor out, which is itself a quietly fitting place for a stone that gathers the dead of several generations under a single surface.