Measuring just over a metre wide and nearly one and a half metres tall, it is not an enormous monument, but it carries a good deal of compressed information about the two families whose names it preserves.

The inscription, transcribed by the scholar Macalister in 1913, reads as a prayer for the souls of Oliver Browne, Esquire, of Cularan, and Julian Lynch, his wife, noting that the monument was erected by them for themselves and their posterity, with a date rendered as Anno Domini 1686. Centred on the plaque is a heraldic shield divided between the arms of both families: a double-headed eagle for Browne, and a chevron between three trefoils for Lynch. The pairing of these arms was a standard way of marking a marriage alliance in post-medieval Ireland, giving the monument a legal as well as devotional character. The Brownes of Cularan and the Lynches of Galway were both prominent Catholic families during a period when such public declarations of identity carried considerable social and political weight, coming as they did in the years immediately following the Restoration and before the upheavals of the Williamite wars.