Inside the ruined chancel of Dysert church, on the southern bank of the River Suir in County Waterford, a graveslab lies dating to 1587. It is a substantial piece of stone, measuring 2.3 metres long, just under a metre wide, and 18 centimetres thick, and it commemorates a Butler Fitzgerot of Ballindysert and his wife, Johanna FitzRichards. The double-barrelled surnames are a small clue to the world this couple inhabited: the Hiberno-Norman practice of combining a father's first name with a prefix to form a surname, so that "Fitzgerot" signals descent from a Gerot, and "FitzRichards" from a Richard. These were families embedded in the layered Anglo-Irish society of late sixteenth-century Munster, where Gaelic and Norman bloodlines had long since intertwined.

The church at Dysert, whose name derives from the Irish "díseart", meaning a hermitage or place of religious retreat, sits within a graveyard that has accumulated centuries of use. The 1587 slab is recorded by the Reverend R. H. Ryland in his 1824 history of County Waterford, and again by a Dr Martin writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in the 1870s, which suggests the stone was already considered noteworthy by the nineteenth century. Ballindysert, the townland associated with Butler Fitzgerot, ties the family directly to this stretch of the Suir valley, and the placement of the slab inside the chancel rather than in the open graveyard indicates a degree of social standing; the chancel was typically reserved for those of particular local consequence.