Raised in relief rather than incised, the lettering reads: "HERE LIETH THE CORPS OF SIR RICH[AR]D BROWN, BARONET AND HIS LA[DY] MARY PLUNCKET. O SWEET JESUS HAVE MERCY." That closing plea, so direct and unadorned, gives the stone an intimacy that grander funerary monuments rarely manage.

The monument commemorates Sir Richard Brown of Ballinamore Castle, who died in 1642, and his wife Mary Pluncket, who survived him by three years, dying in 1645. These were turbulent decades in Ireland; the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath convulsed much of the country, and Sir Richard's death came just a year into that upheaval. The monument is built into the eastern end of the internal face of the south wall of the church at Ballinamore, placing it in a position of some deliberate prominence within the ruin. Wall monuments of this kind, fixed to the interior face of a church wall rather than laid flat as floor slabs, were a common way for gentry families to secure visible commemoration within a sacred space, associating themselves permanently with a place of worship even as the fabric of that world was shifting around them.