Dated 1567, it records the capture of Shane O'Neill, described in the text as 'the great rebel Shane O'Nele', who was brought, in the words of the inscription itself, 'in Subjection to the Crown of England to the Great Joyie of the Realm'. The tone is entirely of its moment, the voice of an Elizabethan administration announcing its authority over a Gaelic Ulster chieftain who had spent years defying it. That such a stone now sits above a rose garden gateway on a County Longford estate gives it an air of incongruity that no amount of landscaping can quite resolve.

The capture it commemorates was the work of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland and one of the most significant agents of Tudor policy on the island. Shane O'Neill, chief of Tyrone, had been a persistent and formidable opponent of the Crown throughout the early 1560s, controlling much of Ulster and refusing to accept the terms by which Elizabeth's government sought to regularise Gaelic lordship. Sidney's success in bringing him to submission in 1567 was regarded in Dublin Castle as a considerable political achievement, hence the language of the inscription with its note of 'great joy'. The stone is now situated to the west of Castle Forbes, a nineteenth-century house at the centre of the Castleforbes Demesne, which means it has outlasted the political world that produced it by several centuries, attached to a landscape utterly different from the one its carvers imagined.