Those spaces were never filled in. The limestone slab, set into the ground towards the western end of the north wall, bears its inscription in raised Roman capitals, the formal lettering of an official monument, yet the document it creates remains permanently incomplete.

The inscription, in Latin, records that the monument was made in the year of Our Lord 1646, and that here lies one John Corcoran, a priest and curate of the parish, along with his mother, whose name is given in the carved text as Honora Trohi. The maiden name of that mother has caused some scholarly disagreement: a history published in 1892 gives it as Trihy, while a later source from 1910 to 1912 reads it as Troy. Both surnames have a long presence in Tipperary, and the ambiguity in the carving itself suggests the stonecutter was working phonetically or from an imperfect instruction. Beneath the lettering, a heraldic shield displays a lion passant guardant, a pose in which the animal walks with one forepaw raised and its head turned to face the viewer, and this device is identified as the arms of the Corcrane family. The year 1646 places the monument in one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, just a few years before the Cromwellian conquest would disrupt Catholic parish life across the country, which may or may not bear on why the blank spaces were never completed.

The slab is modest in size, roughly 66 centimetres wide and 60 centimetres visible above ground, and sits within the ruined fabric of Ballygriffin church itself. What stays with a visitor is less the heraldry or the Latin than those bracketed blanks, spaces the carver left in confident expectation that someone would return to finish the job, and nobody ever did.