It is not the man commemorated that makes it unusual, nor the modest scale of the monument, but the verse carved into it in very small incised letters, a miniature theological meditation on original sin and redemption, written in the first person from beyond the grave.

The church is dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, and the tablet was originally set into the wall at the east end, opposite the Epistle side of the altar. It commemorates William Smyth of Dammag, described as sometime secretary to James, Earl of Ormond and Ossorie, who died on the 24th of April 1655. The Latin phrase "In Domino obdormivit", meaning "he fell asleep in the Lord", closes the formal section of the inscription. What precedes it is stranger: eight lines of English verse in which the deceased speaks directly, working through the doctrine of original sin, the burden of a lifetime of wrongdoing, and the mercy of what the text calls "the dere Lamb of God". The verse then turns outward, asking the reader to remember him, and closing with a prayer for all who ever showed him help or pity. The monument is one of two wall tablets that were formerly set within recesses in the church interior. The inscription was transcribed by Carrigan in 1905 and again, with minor variations in spelling, by Holahan in 1883, suggesting the slab was already being treated as a document worth preserving well before the twentieth century.

What makes the epitaph linger is its register. Wall monuments of this period tend toward stiff heraldic formality or plain biographical record. This one reads more like a personal confession shaped into verse, with an intimacy that sits oddly against the worn stone and roofless walls of the church around it.