The vault does not stand apart from the ecclesiastical fabric; it presses against and over it, as though the boundary between the living commemorating their dead and the ancient structure meant to serve that very purpose had become, at some point, negotiable.

The inscription cut into the stone is precise in some respects and tantalisingly incomplete in others: "THIS TOMB WAS ERECTED FOR DAN O'SULLIVAN WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE JAN ? 1787." The question mark is not editorial shorthand; the day of the month was either never fully carved or has since been lost, leaving the date permanently unresolved. The O'Sullivan name is deeply rooted in this part of Munster, and the formality of the wording reflects the conventions of late eighteenth-century funerary commemoration, when the erection of a named vault over or beside an older sacred site was a way of anchoring family memory to consecrated ground. The church wall the tomb overlies predates 1787 by an unknown margin, and the two structures now read as a single layered object, each element incomplete without the other.