This is the northern of the pair, modest in scale at roughly seventy centimetres tall and sixty wide, but bearing an inscription carved in Roman capitals in relief that asks something directly of whoever passes through the gate. "Pious reader, pray for reverend father Hubert Cahill," it begins, in the Latin of a church still conducting its affairs in the old language even as the world around it was collapsing.

The year matters. By 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland was under way, and Catholic clergy faced suppression, displacement, and worse. Against that backdrop, the inscription records something quietly defiant: that Hubert Cahill, vicar of Kildacomock and Shrule, had a rear sacristy built at his own expense, in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A sacristy, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a room attached to a church where vestments and sacred vessels are kept and clergy prepare for services. The fact that Cahill commissioned this construction and memorialised it in stone, in that particular year, suggests a man determined to leave a record of Catholic institutional life continuing, however precarious its circumstances. The inscription does not record what became of him afterwards.