It was commissioned by a man who wanted to be remembered, who had a Latin inscription cut into stone to say so, and yet the precise location of that monument within the north-east angle of the monastic complex has been lost. What survives instead is a paper trail of conflicting transcriptions, copied and recopied over centuries, each one subtly different from the last.

The inscription itself commemorates Ambrosius Piers, who held the title of Vicar General of the Diocese of Ardfert, a senior administrative role in the pre-Reformation and post-Reformation Catholic ecclesiastical structure in Kerry. The Latin formula, roughly translated, records that he caused this tomb to be made for himself. The date is where the trouble begins. When Richard Hitchcock published the inscription in the Kilkenny Archaeological Journal in 1852, drawing on a communication from a Revd B. Rowan of Tralee, the year given was 1587, placing the monument firmly in the late sixteenth century. A later account, recorded by the scholar John O'Donovan during his 1841 field survey, gave a date of 1687, a full century later. O'Donovan also noted something telling: the tomb itself, set into the north wall near the north-east corner of the church, carried no inscription at all. The limestone flag bearing the name of Ambrosius Piers lay opposite the tomb rather than upon it, and O'Donovan judged that flag to be younger than the monument it was meant to identify.

What that leaves is a puzzle with no tidy resolution. A tomb without its inscription, an inscription possibly displaced from its original tomb, a date that shifts by a hundred years depending on who copied it and when, and a man named Ambrosius Piers who arranged all of this so that posterity would know exactly who he was.