It began its life not in this County Clare town at all, but near Lisdoonvarna, built into a structure close to a castle that no longer stands in any recognisable form. At some point in the twentieth century it was lifted from that context and relocated to its current position, where it now sits in a wall, easy to overlook.

The inscription itself is the reason for paying attention. Carved in false relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to leave letters that appear raised without being fully three-dimensional, it reads: FININFICTE PATRICKE. ME FECIT. 1619 DENIS. CLOCHE. The Latin phrase me fecit, meaning "had me made", was a conventional formula on building plaques of the period, and the translation runs as: Fineen FitzPatrick had me made, 1619. The second name, Denis Cloche, is almost certainly the mason or craftsman responsible, and the surname Cloche is considered an early form of Clohessy, a Clare name that persists in the region to this day. The script is late Gothic in character, a style that continued in use among Irish stonemasons well into the seventeenth century, long after it had fallen out of fashion in print. The plaque was originally associated with the building of a castle at Lisdoonvarna by Fineen FitzPatrick in that same year, 1619, making it a rare surviving piece of contemporary evidence for a structure that has otherwise largely disappeared.

The stone is modest in scale, the kind of thing a person could walk past without a second glance. But for anyone interested in the everyday working life of early seventeenth-century Clare, or in the craftsmen who cut and dressed stone for local lords, it offers something that grander monuments rarely do: a named mason, a date, and a formula that places a specific building act in a specific moment.