When the antiquarian William Carrigan examined it in the early twentieth century, he could only record what remained visible, transcribing a Latin text that breaks off, resumes, and trails into ellipsis where the stone passes under vegetation and time.

The slab dates to the sixteenth century and commemorates members of the Fforstal family, an anglicised Norman surname of some local standing. Robert Fforstal, described as a gentleman, died on the fourteenth of September 1585, though the stone is complicated by the fact that his wife Catherine appears to have predeceased him, dying in 1583. A second generation is also recorded: James Fforstal, whose date of death was never cut into the stone at all, the relevant space left blank as though the mason expected to return and never did. James's wives, Ellis Shortall and Ellen Comerford, are both named, and it was James and Ellen who commissioned the tomb for the family's posterity, paying for it out of their own means. The maker signed his work: James Conney, with a date that Carrigan read as 1608, the middle digit apparently mistaken or ambiguous in the original cutting. The inscription runs in Old English lettering around the sides of the slab and along bands flanking a finely interlaced cross at its centre, a style of knotwork decoration with deep medieval roots in Irish stonework. What gives the whole thing a particular quality is the combination of the uncut death date, the half-buried text, and the signed maker's mark: a monument assembled across years, left unfinished in at least one detail, and still only partially legible more than four centuries later.