Carved with the words "Anthony Brabazon, 1597", it was once set over the entrance to a bawn, the defensive enclosure of stone walls that typically surrounded an Irish tower house or fortified residence in the late medieval and early modern periods. The stone is no longer in its original position, but the inscription remains legible, a small piece of social confidence fixed in the closing years of the sixteenth century.

The name Anthony Brabazon points to a family with significant connections in Connacht during this period. The date, 1597, places the stone's carving in a particularly turbulent stretch of Irish history, falling in the middle of the Nine Years' War. That someone would commission an inscribed gateway stone at such a moment speaks to a certain determination to assert permanence and ownership, to carve one's name literally into the threshold of a fortified home. Gateway inscriptions of this kind were not uncommon among the landed classes of the period, serving something of the same function as a dated plaque on a country house, marking both the builder and the moment of construction for anyone who passed beneath.