What survives is a broken headstone base, roughly 43 centimetres wide and just three centimetres thick, its height tapering from 90 centimetres at one end to a mere 23 at the other. The legible portions amount to little more than scattered letters and a date: the numerals 1699, and the initials M W. The rest is silence.

The graveyard sits on a low rise above a steep northern drop, part of the wider complex associated with the medieval borough of Newcastle. The site has a long and layered history. John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin between 1181 and 1212, granted this foundation to the convent of Grace Dieu, a house of Augustinian canonesses. Nothing of that medieval establishment remains visible today. The church now standing is a late 18th or early 19th-century Church of Ireland building, likely occupying the footprint of the earlier structure. The graveyard around it holds a considerable number of early 18th-century headstones, but the broken fragment near the south-east angle of the church is older still, placing it in the previous century. It lies within what is identified as the Walsh family burial plot, and the initials M W almost certainly mark the resting place of a Walsh who died in 1699, at a moment when Ireland was barely emerging from the upheavals of the Williamite wars. The letters and numerals cut into the stone were meant to preserve a name; what they preserve instead is a partial puzzle, the kind of gap that resists being filled.