When the large recumbent headstones were lifted from their original positions and propped upright against the enclosing wall, the place was left physically cleaner but historically reshuffled, the stones severed from the ground they had marked for centuries. Most of these sandstone slabs date from the eighteenth century, and now they line the perimeter like a crowd pressed to the edges of a room. In among all of this displacement, one monument stayed put and draws the eye precisely because of what it is: a limestone table-tomb, the kind raised on legs or a solid base so that it sits above the ground like a stone altar, dating to 1648 and belonging to the Darby family, their coat of arms carved on top.

The tomb sits at the western end of the south wall of the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland parish church, which occupies the northern sector of the graveyard on a west-facing slope of a north-to-south ridge. The year 1648 places it in the thick of the Cromwellian period in Ireland, and the Darby family, a name associated with the landed gentry of County Offaly, would have been among those with both the means and the social ambition to commission a monument of this kind. The church beside it may itself carry older ground beneath it. A source from 1875, cited by the antiquarian Cooke, raises the possibility that the nineteenth-century building was erected on the site of a medieval church, a common enough pattern in Ireland where new places of worship were planted on ground already long considered sacred.