Today, the main armorial stone has not been traced to any confirmed location, a carved crucifixion slab associated with it has ended up built into a stone shelter beside a mass rock at Cappercullen, and the curious flanking figures had, at one point, been removed to a private house before being brought back by a local man who felt they belonged with the tomb. For a single monument, it has had a remarkably restless afterlife.

The memorial was erected in 1633 by Dulamus, or Donal, Barry, a man the inscription describes as learned in medicine, faithful to the sick and infirm, and devoted to his country. He commissioned it in honour of his parents, his wife Joanna Bourke, and his sons. Thomas Dineley sketched it between 1675 and 1680, recording a heraldic shield bearing the Barry arms with a crescent for difference, and a crest he thought might represent a castle. The monument stood in a small chapel at the west end of Owney Abbey, a site that may underlie the present graveyard. The stone itself was likely cut limestone from quarries in the barony of Clanwilliam, possibly the quarries at Caherline and Ballyhobin recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, though it was commonly described at the time as marble. The sculpture may have been the work of Patrick O'Kerin, whose father Walter founded the O'Kerin school of monumental sculpture in the Ossory region during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By 1865, portions of the monument had been pressed into service as headstones, and when a member of the Shirley family searched for them, the churchyard had grown so thickly over that nothing could be found. In 1877, the armorial stone was still in place as an altar-tomb, with its carved crucifixion slab at the head and the two female figures on pillars at either side.

The graveyard at Abington adjoins the ruins of Owney Abbey, and a low earthen mound outside its boundary is the spot from which the flanking figures were eventually dug out. The carved crucifixion slab, which Seymour described in 1907 as showing Christ on the cross with the Virgin and St John on either side, has since migrated to Cappercullen, where it is incorporated into a modern shelter near the mass rock. A mass rock is a flat stone used as an improvised altar during the Penal era, when Catholic worship was prohibited, and the shelter at Cappercullen appears to have been built around or alongside one such site. Visitors to Abington may find the graveyard itself rewarding for its surviving carved stones, but should be prepared for the fact that the Barry monument's principal component remains unlocated, scattered across a landscape that has been slowly absorbing it for the better part of four centuries.