It began its life in the adjacent graveyard before being moved indoors, and it records not a burial but a financial bequest, specifically the funding of a building project, and the care taken to ensure that care was properly acknowledged in stone.

The inscription names one Cornit Anthony Hathorne, who bequeathed fifty pounds sterling, noted in the period style as "50lib Ster", for the rebuilding of the chancel of a seventeenth-century church on the site. A chancel is the eastern portion of a church, typically containing the altar and reserved for the clergy, and its rebuilding would have been a significant undertaking. The plaque is explicit that the gift came from pious motivation, "out of his pious zeal to the place of Gods worship", and equally explicit about what happened next: the work was carried out faithfully by Phillip Hathorne, Anthony's nephew and heir. The date given is 1681. What makes the inscription quietly unusual is its double portrait. Anthony Hathorne is credited with the vision and the money; Phillip Hathorne is credited with the execution and the follow-through. The stone is essentially a family record as much as a church record, commemorating not just generosity but the reliable completion of a dead man's wishes by someone who stood to inherit from him.

The plaque is now set into the vestry wall of St. Nicholas' Church rather than left exposed to the Wicklow weather, which is almost certainly why the inscription remains legible. Visitors to the church who make their way into the vestry will find the text carved in the blunt, capitalised style typical of late seventeenth-century memorial stonework, each line broken mid-word where the mason ran out of space, giving the whole thing an oddly urgent, breathless quality on the eye.