What makes it quietly curious is the story compressed into its inscription, and the long, itinerant afterlife the monument itself has had within the building. Baroque in style, it takes the form of a richly ornamented neo-Classical portico, the kind of architectural framing more commonly associated with grand civic buildings than a church interior, set over an elaborate carved apron. At the bottom left, almost as a footnote to the grandeur above, a craftsman's mark reads "Stanton of Harthnale London", identifying the stonemason responsible for the whole composition.

The monument commemorates Colonel Robert Maude, originally of Ripon in Yorkshire and later of Dundrum in County Tipperary, who died in 1684, along with his wife Frances, who came from the Wandesford family, their son Anthony, and their youngest daughter Anne. It is Anne who gives the monument its particular character. She died unmarried in 1703, at fifty-eight years of age, and it was her own last will that directed her executors to "distinguish and adorn the burying place of her family." The monument, in other words, was effectively commissioned from beyond the grave by the woman it memorialises alongside her relatives. The Wandesford connection is worth noting: the Wandesfords were a prominent Anglo-Irish family with strong ties to Kilkenny, which may partly explain why a Yorkshire colonel who ended his days in Tipperary came to be remembered so elaborately in a Kilkenny church. Originally the monument stood on the south wall of the chancel near the crossing, which would have placed it at a prominent liturgical threshold. It was subsequently relocated to the south wall of a room in the north transept that was used specifically for housing monuments, before being rebuilt in its current position on the south side of the south transept in 2015.