The stone measures just 22 centimetres high and 50 centimetres wide, yet it has outlasted almost everything it once belonged to. The castle it commemorates is gone, the manor house it was later incorporated into has been levelled, and what survives is this fragment of masonry, recycled into a 19th-century courtyard gateway, still announcing a repair job carried out more than three and a half centuries ago.

The man behind the inscription had a complicated path to the Irish midlands. Captain Andrew Adaire had served as an officer in the army of Charles I during the wars of the 1640s, and when the royalist cause collapsed, soldiers like him found themselves waiting. His moment came after the Restoration, when the Act of Settlement of 1662 and the Act of Explanation of 1665 together sought to resolve the tangled question of land ownership in Ireland by granting estates to loyal officers who had supported the Crown. Adaire was among those listed as '1649 Officers', the designation given to royalist soldiers who received land grants under this settlement. By 1659 he was already established enough to appear in the census of that year as one of the principal gentlemen of the Corporation of St Johnstown, the area now known as Ballinalee. The repair of his castle in 1666 fits neatly into this picture: a man who had recently secured his landholding and was now putting it in order, marking the work in stone as landowners of that period often did.