They are easy to overlook against the worn masonry, yet the inscription cut into them in large relief capitals is remarkably legible for its age, commemorating two people by name across a gap of nearly four centuries.

The panels date to 1650 and record William Magencharig, whose surname carries a question mark over the precise spelling, and his wife Elizabeth. The mid-seventeenth century was a turbulent moment to be commissioning funerary stonework in Clare; the decade saw the upheaval of the Cromwellian wars and the disruption of Catholic religious life across the country. That a family took the trouble to have a chest tomb carved and inscribed at all speaks to the persistence of certain social and devotional expectations even in difficult years. Kilfenora itself had been the seat of a small diocese since the medieval period, and its cathedral, though long since without a roof on its eastern end, retained significance as a place of burial and commemoration. The source for the tomb's identification, cited as Barry 1892, suggests it was recorded by antiquarians in the Victorian period, by which point the panels had presumably already been repositioned against the wall rather than standing as a freestanding monument.