What makes it worth pausing over is not simply its age, but the layered nature of its inscriptions: someone carved words into the stone in the seventeenth century, and then, decades later, someone else returned and added more. Two separate people, separated by a generation or more, felt moved to mark the same slab.

The graveslab is rectangular and cut from limestone, measuring 1.26 metres long, 0.64 metres wide, and 0.06 metres thick. Gravestabs of this type, flat slabs laid horizontally over a burial and incised rather than carved in relief, were common across Ireland from the medieval period onward, often bearing the name of the deceased, a date, and occasionally a devotional phrase or symbol. This particular example carries a seventeenth-century inscription, to which a further inscription was added in the eighteenth century, suggesting the stone remained visible and meaningful to later visitors or perhaps to descendants of whoever was first commemorated. The details were recorded by Bradley and King in 1988 and compiled for the record by Geraldine Stout in 2011.

The slab is housed within a tower at Swords Glebe, which sits just outside the town of Swords, north of Dublin city. Access to the interior where the slab is kept may be limited, and the fragmentary condition of the stone means the inscriptions themselves may require close attention to read clearly. If you are visiting the wider Swords area, which already draws interest for its round tower and castle, it is worth knowing that this quieter site exists nearby, preserving a small and specifically human record, one person's name and then another's, pressed into stone across two different centuries.