In the chancel of the ruined Dysert church, on the southern bank of the River Suir in Co. Waterford, a large graveslab lies as it has since the mid-seventeenth century. Measuring two metres in length and nearly a metre wide, the slab is not remarkable for its size alone, but for what it records: a marriage between two families whose names appear across the Waterford landscape, set in stone in the year 1643, at a moment when Ireland was tipping into the catastrophic violence of the Confederate Wars.

The slab commemorates Charles Everard of Glen Lower and his wife, recorded as Clarisa Wale, of Coolnamuck, though the question mark that attaches to her first name in the historical record hints at how much uncertainty clings even to the most apparently solid monuments. The Everard family were a notable Old English Catholic dynasty in Munster, and the Wales of Coolnamuck were likewise embedded in the landowning world of the Suir valley. The church itself, Dysert, takes its name from the Irish word for a hermitage or desert place, the kind of early Christian retreat site that gave rise to so many parish churches across Ireland. By 1643, such sites had long since been absorbed into the ordinary fabric of parochial life, though the turbulence of that particular decade would upend ordinary life entirely for families like the Everards. The slab is noted in the Reverend R. H. Ryland's 1824 county history of Waterford, and again by a Dr. Martin writing in the 1870s, suggesting it was already regarded as an object worth recording rather than merely walking past.