That dispersal, slow and quiet across four centuries, is what makes what survives at Abington so worth attending to. The partial remains, built into the north wall of a medieval building that was converted into a mausoleum for the Walsh family of Abbey Owney, preserve enough of the original composition to suggest something once genuinely ambitious.

The monument commemorates Edmund Walsh and bears a Latin inscription dated 1618, signed by its maker Patrick Kearin, a sculptor from the O'Kerin school of monumental carving that operated in the Ossory region during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Kearin also carved the tomb of Archbishop Miler Magrath at Cashel and a memorial to Walter Bourk at Glankeen church in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, which places this Limerick commission within a recognisable regional tradition of high-status funerary work. The monument itself is a multi-tiered composition: a sarcophagus base, a middle arcade of three round-headed arches on plain Doric columns, pilasters supporting an architrave, and a stone canopy carved with small saintly figures and five coats of arms. Scholar Paul Cockerham has noted its close resemblance to the Shee and Rothe tombs in Kilkenny. The stone, described at the time as black marble, was most likely cut limestone from quarries in the barony of Clanwilliam; the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records quarries at Caherline and Ballyhobin that may have supplied the material. When Thomas Dineley sketched the monument between 1675 and 1680, he recorded four carved saints, including St Peter, St Bernard, the Virgin, and St Mary Magdalene, placed over the doorway. By 1865, a visitor noted the monument was still in fair preservation but the chapel roofless. By 1907, when the Reverend Seymour translated the Latin inscription, figures of St Peter, the Virgin, and St Mary Magdalene had already vanished entirely.

The St Bernard slab that Dineley drew in the 1670s, showing a figure clasping the emblems of the Passion with the inscription SAINBERNARD running in a semicircle above, can now be found not at Abington but at the Cappercullen mass rock, a penal-era site where Catholics gathered to hear Mass clandestinely during the eighteenth century when public worship was suppressed under the Penal Laws. Scroll brackets from the original Walsh monument also appear to have been reused in the mass rock shelter there. Visiting both sites, in a sense, gives a fuller picture of what once existed, though the Abington remains themselves, set into a weathered medieval wall, repay careful looking for the carved grotesque heads among vine-branches and grape-clusters that survive above the inscription.