Cut with roman capitals and carrying a commission inscription from 1687, it was not made for a medieval fortification at all, but for a merchant's premises on what was then Mill Street in Ennis, the town now knows the same stretch as Parnell Street. The stone is a stray, a piece of civic self-advertisement that has drifted far from its original context, and its mis-spellings make it all the more arresting: 'GEOARGE STACPOLE MEARCHANT' had his name and trade mangled in stone, and 'FINISED' stands where 'FINISHED' ought to be, fixed in the record for over three centuries.

The inscription was noted by the antiquary T. J. Westropp in the 1890s, and the stone's journey since then is itself a small history of how architectural fragments get displaced. Before reaching Dysert O'Dea, it spent time at Edenvale, another Clare site, presumably salvaged when the Ennis building was demolished or altered. It eventually came to rest in the tower house at Dysert O'Dea, a tower house being a compact, defensible residence of the later medieval period, common across Ireland, of which this one has been restored and is associated with the broader Dysert O'Dea complex. The merchant behind the inscription, George Stackpoole, was presumably a figure of some local standing in late seventeenth-century Ennis, though the stone itself is the only trace of him here, a single sentence of patronage interrupted by a stonemason's uncertain spelling.