The inscription records not just the year of Joseph Cuffe's death, but the very morning, and even the hour: Christmas Day, 1697, somewhere between nine and ten o'clock. That kind of temporal specificity is rare in funerary inscriptions, and it gives the memorial an oddly intimate quality, as though the family wished to fix the exact moment of his departure in stone.

The monument is described by Hogan, writing in the early 1880s, as a very elaborately finished mural entablature, a term for a decorative wall panel or tablet, typically framed with classical architectural elements. This one was carved in white marble and set into the chancel wall, where it commemorated Joseph Cuffe of Castleinch, who died at the age of fifty-eight. A mural entablature of this kind was a mark of some social standing in late seventeenth-century Ireland, when such monuments were generally reserved for those of means or local prominence. Cuffe's association with Castleinch, a place whose name survives in the broader parish landscape of Kilkenny, suggests he was a figure of some local consequence, though the historical record beyond the monument itself is thin.