The wall itself dates from 1804, but the panel is considerably older, a rectangular cartouche cut from fossiliferous limestone, roughly 95 centimetres long and 65 centimetres wide, and bearing a heraldic device that places its origins somewhere in the mid-17th century. A cartouche, in this context, is an ornamental frame, typically carved in relief, used to display a coat of arms or an inscription with a degree of ceremony. This one carries an impaled shield, meaning two coats of arms displayed side by side within a single shield to signify a marriage alliance, joining the Archer family on one side with the Denn family on the other.

Both families were part of Kilkenny's established civic and merchant world. The Archers in particular were a prominent Old English family with deep roots in the town, and a monument like this would have been a relatively conventional way of marking status and connection in the decades before or after the disruptions of the 1640s and 1650s, a period that scattered, dispossessed, or simply erased many such families from the Irish landscape. That the panel survived is partly luck and partly the practical instinct of early 19th-century builders who, when constructing the cross wall to link the south-west side of the church with the graveyard boundary, incorporated the older stone rather than discarding it. The fossiliferous limestone, a material common in Kilkenny and recognisable by the ancient marine creatures visible in its surface, has kept the carving legible across several centuries.