Classified as a possible chest tomb, the structure carries a Latin inscription cut in Roman capitals, the kind of formal lettering that would have signalled learning and status in early seventeenth-century Ireland. A chest tomb, for those unfamiliar with the form, is a box-shaped above-ground monument, essentially a hollow rectangular structure resembling a stone chest, used to mark the graves of those who could afford to distinguish themselves from the ordinary dead.

The inscription commemorates someone named Fennell, and the tomb is dated to around 1620, placing it in the final years of Gaelic Ireland's collapse and the opening decades of the Plantation era, when funerary monuments across the island were absorbing new influences from England and the Continent. The use of Latin and Roman capitals at this date is not unusual among the Catholic gentry and merchant classes, who continued to commission inscribed tombs in the older ecclesiastical tradition even as the political world around them shifted considerably. The Fennell name, though not among the most prominent recorded families of the Kilkenny area, was evidently carried by someone whose survivors felt the occasion warranted carved stone and formal Latin.