The inscription asks those who pass to remember Cecil Coulter and Louisa Alice his wife, who between 1918 and 1946 "met sorrow and adversity with fortitude" and who, through their vision and labours, made what the inscription calls "this wilderness a place of beauty." It is the kind of private memorial that was never meant to be widely seen, set into a domestic wall rather than a churchyard, addressed to a passerby who might easily never come.

The stone was documented by the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson in 1985, during his remarkable project mapping South Connemara. Robinson connected the memorial's reference to sorrow with a separate tablet in Roundstone Protestant church, which records the death of the Coulters' son, Conrad Coryton, killed in the First World War at the age of nineteen. The family arrived at An Cnoc Buí in 1918, the same year the war ended, and the dates on the plaque suggest they remained there until 1946. The building it adorns has had its own quiet transformation, having begun as stables before being converted into an L-shaped house, with the plaque persisting through each change of use.