Carved in slightly raised Roman capitals, it carries a Latin inscription that records an act of domestic restoration, not a burial or a prayer, but a man noting, in the durable language of cut stone, that he had repaired his family home. The exact spot where it now rests is unknown, which gives the object a quietly unsettled quality: a domestic artefact pressed into the company of the dead, its original architectural context long gone.

The inscription, which the historian William Carrigan noted in 1905, reads HAS AEDES RESTAVRAVIT, meaning roughly "restored this house", followed by a name beginning with R, the title Armiger (a Latin term for a gentleman entitled to bear heraldic arms, broadly equivalent to a squire), and a reference to someone identified only as the above-mentioned Marcus. Carrigan read the fragmentary text as recording Richard Shee, son of a Marcus Shee, carrying out repairs to a residence associated with the Shee family at Sheastown, some time around the middle of the seventeenth century. The Shees were a prominent Kilkenny family of medieval merchant origin, and Sheastown itself takes its name from them. The date in the inscription is incomplete, the final numerals worn or broken away, leaving the year tantalisingly open.