It is a quiet, easy thing to walk past, yet the fragmentary Roman-lettered text preserves two names and two precise dates across a span of thirteen years, a small record of a family's losses during one of the more turbulent stretches of seventeenth-century Dublin.

The slab commemorates John Steel, buried on the 15th of August 1654, and Henry Steel, buried on the 15th of December 1667. The years matter as context. John Steel's burial in 1654 came in the immediate aftermath of the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, a period of profound disruption to land ownership, religious practice, and civic life in Dublin. Henry Steel's death in 1667 fell into the early Restoration period, when the city was beginning to recover and expand northward across the Liffey. St Michan's itself, on the north bank, is one of the older parish churches in the city, with origins stretching back to the medieval period, and its churchyard accumulated centuries of burials from the surrounding parish. The inscription was recorded in volume nine of the Memorials of the Dead, published between 1913 and 1916, which documented grave markers across Ireland at a time when many were already deteriorating. That publication remains the source for much of what is known about the slab.

St Michan's is accessible from Church Street in Dublin 7, and the church is perhaps better known to visitors for its vaults, where the unusual preservative conditions of the soil have kept a number of mummified remains. The churchyard itself receives less attention. The broken slab, now fragmentary, requires some patience to locate and read; Roman lettering on weathered stone from this period can be difficult to make out, and portions of the inscription have been lost. Visiting in good light, ideally on an overcast day when there is no direct glare, helps. The churchyard is a working historic space attached to an active Church of Ireland parish, so access to the grounds is subject to the usual considerations around opening times and services.