' Two women, two dates three years apart, one slab, fitted into the stonework of a church that was already centuries old when it received them. The east end of Cloghprior had by then been converted into a private burial enclosure for the Cambie family, a common enough practice among the new landowning class of Cromwellian Ireland, who inserted themselves into the existing fabric of the landscape, sometimes quite literally.

Solomon Cambie, the man who commissioned or inspired the slab, had arrived in Ireland as a Parliamentary officer and stayed to prosper. In 1656 he was governor of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, and by 1659 he had signed a petition to the Commonwealth pressing for the completion of the Down Survey of Ireland, the great mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project that mapped forfeited Catholic-owned lands for redistribution among Protestant settlers. That same year, a census listed him as owner of the lands of Annagh in the parish of Kilbarron, Co. Tipperary, lands that had belonged to a John Hurly and were granted to Cambie as one of Cromwell's officers. The transition from soldier to landowner was smoothed further in 1661, when the Earl of Orrery sought a royal pardon for him under the terms of a post-Restoration Act of Parliament, and the Irish Treasury recorded arrears owed to him as Major and Captain amounting to £489 17s. Through the 1660s and 1670s he appears repeatedly in Chancery pleadings and land transactions, buying, selling, and defending parcels of Tipperary ground. By 1677 his son Samuel, described as heir apparent, was witnessing a large indenture for the sale of multiple townlands to a William Cleburn of Kilkenny. The family's grip on the land was already loosening, edged out by the same legal machinery that had brought them there.

The church itself is worth attention beyond the slab. The ruins of Cloghprior retain a partially blocked twin-light ogee-headed window in the east gable, a round-headed window with a bellcote above it in the west gable, and nineteenth-century headstones pressed into the outer faces of the north wall and east gable, generations of local dead layered over and around the earlier stonework. A 3D model of the graveslab can be viewed online at skfb.ly/ovWr9.