Monuments of this kind, raised by landed families across rural Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were rarely built for entirely disinterested reasons; they served as declarations of presence, of permanence, of a family's intention to remain rooted in a place. That this one survives, and that it carries a name as historically significant as Trench, a surname bound up with some of the more complicated chapters of Anglo-Irish landlordism in Connacht, gives it a particular kind of weight.

The Trench family were prominent in Galway and the surrounding region for several centuries, and their various branches left marks across the west of Ireland in the form of estate architecture, demesne walls, and occasionally more deliberate commemorative structures. Without more detailed records it is difficult to say precisely which member of the family this monument was raised to honour, or when, or by whom the decision was made. What can be said is that Moneyveen, like many Galway townlands, carries its history lightly and in fragments, and a monument of this sort is often the most visible evidence remaining of a social world that has otherwise largely disappeared from view.