"Whoever you be who cast your eye upon these monuments," the Latin inscription reads, "pause awhile, read, learn to live, learn you to die." The man who commissioned both pieces, Patrick Kerin, signed his work in 1626 and signed off with a request: "Pray for me." It is an unusually personal intrusion into what is otherwise a fairly standard commemorative form, and it survives in a church whose chancel has been completely destroyed and whose remaining walls are only partially standing.

The church at Glenkeen sits on high ground at the centre of a large graveyard enclosed by a nineteenth-century wall, on an east-facing slope in an upland area. The site's origins are considerably older than anything now visible. It was founded by St Culan in the seventh century, and the community he established left at least one remarkable material trace: a twelfth-century bell shrine, a reliquary made to house a saintly bell, was discovered in a nearby hollow tree close to a holy well to the west of the church. The graveslab itself was erected by Kerin to honour Walter Burke, described in the Latin as lord of the territory of Illeigh and "sometime stalwart and wise captain," who died on the tenth of June in a year whose digits are no longer legible. The inscription records his wife, Sheila, daughter of O'Dwyer, and their four sons, Theobald, William, Miles, and John, along with several daughters, all said to have been married to men of the highest rank. The graveyard around the church contains memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in 1821 an old mill was discovered in the ground nearby.