This is not a modest memorial. It is a chest tomb, a box-shaped raised monument common in post-medieval Ireland and Britain, and whoever commissioned it wanted the message to be unmistakable. Above the heraldry, three words cut into the stone still read: SVRGITE MORTVI VENITE AD IVDICIVM, "Rise, dead ones, come to judgement."

The tomb commemorates two people: John Verdon, who died on 19 August 1614 at the age of sixty-three, and Alsona Haly, his wife, who died on 2 October 1626. The monument itself was erected in 1627, and the Latin inscription names the man who commissioned it: Walter Coppinger, described as Eques Auratus, a Knight, and apparently a relative of Alsona Haly. The inscription identifies him as placing this "monument of mourning and love," the phrase funebris et amoris monumentum giving the stone an unexpectedly tender quality beneath its formal Latin. The tomb is recorded in the Urban Survey of County Limerick compiled by Bradley and others in 1989, and had already attracted the attention of antiquarians by the late nineteenth century, appearing in sources cited by the historian Thomas Westropp in his early twentieth-century surveys of Limerick.

Kilmallock is a small town in south County Limerick with a remarkable concentration of medieval and post-medieval remains, including the ruins of a Dominican friary, a collegiate church, and substantial town walls. The Verdon-Coppinger tomb sits within this layered ecclesiastical landscape. Visitors should look closely at the carved figures on the slab, which retain enough detail to show the style of dress favoured by the Anglo-Irish gentry of the early seventeenth century. The Latin inscription, though worn in places, repays slow reading. The line breaks in surviving records reflect the way the text was laid out across the stone itself, which gives some sense of how the carver worked within the available space.