The spelling is of its era, the vowels wayward, the Vs standing in for Us in the Continental fashion, but the message is plain enough: a widow had this made, seventeen years after her husband died, to mark his passing and secure his memory for the generations that followed.

The inscription, transcribed by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1913, records that Sir John Burke of Derrimagh died in 1666, the year of his age left unstated in the surviving text, and that the monument was raised in 1683 by his widow, the Lady Mary Burke, who by that point held the title Baroness of Athenry. The seventeen-year gap between death and monument is worth pausing over. The 1660s and 1670s were turbulent decades for Catholic landowning families in Ireland, still absorbing the upheavals of the Cromwellian period, and the delay may reflect the difficulties of that era as much as any personal circumstance. When Lady Mary did finally commission the plaque, she framed it explicitly as a memorial not just for her husband but for his posterity, a deliberate act of genealogical anchoring at a moment when such families had reason to feel their position was precarious. The Burke family, one of the great Norman-Irish dynasties, had long been woven into the fabric of Connacht, and the Barony of Athenry itself had passed through many hands and much conflict over the preceding centuries.

The plaque measures roughly 85 centimetres wide by 99 centimetres tall and bears a heraldic shield alongside the inscription, the combination of image and text being the standard form for such wall monuments of the period. It remains in the chancel wall where it was placed, a modest object carrying a carefully worded claim about family, title, and continuity.