It was made to honour a seventeenth-century merchant family, yet the inscription at its base is now completely illegible to the naked eye. What survives clearly is the carved heraldic shield at the panel's centre, its surface unusually convex rather than flat, bearing the joined arms of the Shee and Pembroke families. Beneath it, a scroll carries the motto VINCIT VERITAS, meaning "Truth Conquers", with the initials P.S. and M.P. rendered in false-relief on either side. The panel itself, roughly 92 centimetres long and 74 centimetres wide, is cut from fossiliferous limestone, a stone dense with the remains of ancient marine creatures, and that material gives the slab a quiet geological depth that sits oddly alongside its genealogical ambitions.

The plaque commemorates Patrick Shee, son of Gaspar, and his wife Maria Pembroke, who died on 28 March 1646. The Latin inscription, though now worn beyond reading, was transcribed in the early twentieth century by the historian William Carrigan and records that Patrick served twice as under-sheriff of Kilkenny city, a role described in the text as generalis vice-comes, a position of considerable civic standing. The inscription also notes that he was a man well regarded by all, a careful and devoted parent to a large and excellent family, and that he erected the monument with his own death in mind, as a memorial for himself, his beloved wife Maria, his heir Jacob Shee, and their children and descendants. The phrase mortalitatis memor, "mindful of mortality", gives the whole thing an introspective quality unusual even for funerary Latin. The plaque was described by an impaling shield, a heraldic convention in which a husband's arms are placed alongside his wife's on a single divided shield, signalling the union of two families. The monument does not appear to have remained in a single location: by 1804 it had been built into a cross wall connecting the south-western side of the church with the graveyard wall, where it remains today.