Measuring just 0.88 metres tall and 0.33 metres wide, it records the death of a man named James Byrn, his son, and his daughters, all in the single year of 1690, with the initials S.B. carved beneath. The inscription trails off with an ellipsis where the daughters' names or number might once have been made clearer, and that gap in the stone's text gives the whole thing an unsettled quality, a family reduced to a partial list.

The year 1690 is a charged one in Irish history, falling in the middle of the Williamite War, when the struggle between the Catholic Jacobites and the Protestant Williamites brought widespread disruption, displacement, and death across the country. Whether the Byrn family's losses were connected to the upheaval of that period or to disease, accident, or some other misfortune, the stone does not say. What it does offer is the relative rarity of a securely dated seventeenth-century headstone in a rural Irish churchyard. Slate was a practical choice for memorial carving in Wicklow, a county with ready access to the material, and headstones from this period that have survived legibly are uncommon. The initials S.B. likely identify the person who commissioned or carved the stone, though their identity remains unrecorded.