" The stone is both a graveslab and a plea, commissioned by a man named Patrick Kerin to commemorate Walter Burke of Illeigh, and its tone is less funerary than urgent, a kind of seventeenth-century memento mori pressed into masonry. The chancel of the church it inhabits has been completely destroyed, and only partial sections of the north and south walls survive alongside the intact west gable, which makes the persistence of this particular inscription all the more arresting. The full Latin text ends with the line "Patricius Kerin me fabricavit 1626", Patrick Kerin made me, a craftsman's signature folded into a theological argument.

The site at Glenkeen sits on an east-facing slope of rising ground and has considerably older origins than the 1626 memorial suggests. According to Gwynn and Hadcock's survey of medieval religious houses, the church was founded by St Culan in the seventh century. The place accumulated layers of significance over the following millennium. A twelfth-century reliquary known as the bell shrine of St Culan, the kind of ornate metal casing made to house a saint's hand bell as a sacred object in its own right, was discovered in a nearby hollow tree in the early nineteenth century, close to a holy well associated with the same saint that lies to the west of the church. In 1821, the remains of an old mill were found near the church as well, suggesting that this upland enclosure was once a good deal busier than it appears today. The large graveyard surrounding the ruined nave is enclosed by a nineteenth-century wall and contains memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which gives the whole site a quality of accumulated time, each era leaving something behind without entirely obscuring what came before it.