It is not quite where it started out, and the wall around it had to be cut away at an angle just to fit it in. A 13th or 14th-century graveslab, an older burial marker in its own right, lies partly buried beneath its western end, pressed into service almost as a foundation stone for whatever rearrangement brought the monument to its present position.

The Dominican friary at Athenry, founded in the thirteenth century, accumulated a great deal of funerary stonework over the centuries, and this structure represents some of the most complex of it. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1913, interpreted the monument as three distinct tomb arcades set side by side, each consisting of a series of arches supported on piers, the kind of recessed canopy arrangement common in Irish medieval churches for marking the graves of wealthy patrons or clergy. The western and central tombs each carried three arches, the eastern one two, with a narrow pier dividing the first pair and a wider pier separating them from the eastern tomb. Macalister's own photographs showed that almost all the arch stones and one pillar of the western tomb had already been lost at that point. Restoration work subsequently reinstated those missing elements, and a third arch was also inserted between the middle and eastern sections, meaning that what a visitor sees today is partly medieval, partly reconstructed. It is thought the tombs may originally have stood in the nave or chancel of the church before being dismantled and rebuilt in the transept. A separate wall monument was later inserted above the central tomb, adding yet another layer to an already complicated history of movement and reuse.