Cut into its face are the words: HERE LIETH THE BODY OF PHELPS WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 15TH DAY OF JVNE 1679. No first name is given, or if one was, it has been lost to erosion or was never fully rendered. The use of JVNE, with a V in place of a U, is a standard feature of seventeenth-century lettering conventions rather than an error, but it gives the stone an archaic quality that sits oddly even against its already considerable age.

The memorial stands in the graveyard attached to the church at Glebe, Co. Wicklow, and was recorded in the Urban Survey conducted by Bradley and King in 1989. The stone is relatively modest in its dimensions, standing 0.68 metres high and roughly half a metre wide, with a depth of around 0.1 metres. What is recorded of the deceased is only the surname, Phelps, and a date of death in June 1679, placing the burial in the later years of the seventeenth century, a period when Ireland was still absorbing the upheavals that had followed the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s. Whether Phelps was a settler, a long-established resident, or something else entirely, the stone does not say.