What makes it quietly unusual is not its form but its faces: four plaques, one on each side, recording the names of a family across a span of years at the turn of the eighteenth century.

The names recorded are John and his wife Saramsweiny, along with Rickard and Florenc Fitzpatrick, commemorated in dates running from 1701 to 1709. The Fitzpatricks were not an Aran family by origin; the name has roots on the Irish mainland, and their presence here, memorialised in a carefully constructed mortared monument rather than a simple grave slab, points to a household of some local consequence. The name Saramsweiny is particularly arresting, almost certainly an anglicised rendering of the Irish Saraid or a similar feminine name filtered through the phonetic habits of whoever cut or commissioned the lettering. The monument stands immediately east of an earlier ecclesiastical site, situating it within a landscape that had been a place of burial and religious significance since the early medieval period. Cill Éinne, the church of Saint Enda, carries one of the most ancient Christian associations in the west of Ireland, and the Fitzpatrick monument is one of several later additions that accumulated around that older core over the centuries.