It was recorded, its inscription carefully noted, and then it disappeared. What survives is the text alone: a line of Roman capitals naming Thomas Hickman of Ballyhinnan, esquire, who died in September 1677, and beside him Elizabeth his wife, who died in the same year, daughter to George Colpoys of Ballicarr, esquire. The stone itself is gone, leaving only the words that were once cut into it.

What makes the absence particularly affecting is that we know, in some detail, how the slab came to be placed there at all. Thomas Hickman's will, drawn up in 1677, specified that his body should be interred in the chancel of the church of Ennis, close to his wife and mother. He also directed his eldest son, Thomas junior, to retrieve a stone that was already waiting at Ballyhinnan, near the waterside, have it polished, and lay it over the tomb, with the family arms and name engraved upon it. The instruction reads with a practical clarity unusual in such documents, as though Hickman had planned the monument well in advance and simply needed someone to see it through. The antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the slab and its inscription in the late nineteenth century, placing it in the south-east corner of the chancel of Ennis Friary, the substantial Franciscan house founded in the thirteenth century that still stands at the centre of the town. By the time later researchers came to verify the record, it was gone.

Ennis Friary remains accessible and is well worth visiting for its medieval stonework and sculpture. The chancel where the Hickman slab once rested can still be seen, though nothing now marks the spot where two people who died within months of each other in 1677 were laid, beneath a stone that had been sitting by a riverbank, waiting.