The same object served both purposes at once, concealed behind the tall roofless gable of the ruined friary church, tucked inside a thatched Penal chapel where Catholic worship could continue out of sight. Penal chapels were makeshift structures built or adapted during the era of the Penal Laws, when Catholic practice was suppressed and clergy operated under serious legal risk. That a finely worked piece of funerary stonework sat at the centre of this arrangement gives it an unusual dual identity, part memorial, part liturgical fixture.

The tomb was commissioned in 1739 by Archbishop Bernard O'Gara of Tuam, who had it made in memory of his father, Charlis O'Gara, and the wider family. The six-line inscription carved into one face of the central block makes this plain in the direct, contracted spelling of the period: "Pray for Y souls of Charlis O Gara and Family for whom this Tomb was made by his Son Ber. Ar. Of Tuam AN. DM. 1739." Above the inscription sit the letters IHS, a Christogram long used in Catholic devotional contexts, with a simple cross rising from the H and the letters INRI flanking it, all enclosed within a carved band of scroll motif. The limestone structure itself is tiered: a horizontal table top oversailing a square inscribed block, which in turn rests on a moulded pedestal, standing just under one and a half metres in total height. Bernard O'Gara's family connection adds another layer of historical weight. He was the grandson of Fergal O'Gara, the seventeenth-century patron who funded the compilation of the Annals of the Four Masters, one of the most significant chronicles of early Irish history. The archbishop's decision to establish a functioning chapel around his father's memorial, in the shell of a suppressed friary, was both an act of private devotion and a quiet act of defiance.