At nearly two and a half metres high and almost two metres wide, it is a substantial piece of work, topped by an armorial crest displaying the combined arms of the Whitty and Stafford families, with a Latin inscription below and, unusually, a prayer in English beneath that. The mixing of languages is itself telling, a household negotiating between the formal conventions of commemoration and something more personal.

The monument was erected in 1649 by Richard Whitty, and it carries an unusual density of grief. It commemorates his parents, Walter Whitty of Ballyteige, who died in 1630, and his wife Helena, daughter of Hammond Stafford of Ballyconor, who died in 1646. But the inscription also records Richard's first wife, Catherine, daughter of Philip Devereux of Ballmagir, who also died in 1646. The monument was set up jointly by Richard and his second wife, Catherine, daughter of Oliver Eustace of Ballynurry. Two deaths in the same year, a remarriage, and then the commissioning of a single stone to hold all of it together: the timeline alone suggests something of the turbulence of that decade in Ireland, when the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath brought upheaval to Old English Catholic families precisely like the Whittys, the Staffords, the Devereux, and the Eustaces, all names with deep roots in the medieval Anglo-Norman settlement of Wexford. Wall monuments of this type, where a carved plaque and heraldic achievement are set flush against the interior masonry of a church, were a common way for gentry families of the period to assert lineage and piety simultaneously, combining the visual language of heraldry with the written language of Latin commemoration.