The fit is imperfect by design, or perhaps by indifference: the chest tomb, with its cut-stone round-headed arch above, partly blocks the double ogee-headed light of the 15th-century altar recess it occupies. An ogee is a flowing S-shaped curve, a decorative form popular in late medieval ecclesiastical architecture, and to have one obscured by a later intrusion gives the whole arrangement a slightly awkward, layered quality, as though two different centuries are politely arguing over the same wall.

The tomb itself is limestone, and the craftsmanship is careful. Mouldings run along the edges of the coffin lid and are repeated along the base, giving the piece a visual symmetry that draws the eye down the full height of it. Most striking, though, is the Latin inscription carved in false relief along the front face, just below the lid. It reads: Orate pro anima Davidis oge Kelly qui me fieri fecit sibi et heredibus suis Anno Domini 1623 et ejus uxori Anabala Barrett, which translates as a prayer for the soul of David Kelly junior, who commissioned the tomb for himself, his heirs, and his wife Anabla Barrett. The phrase "qui me fieri fecit", meaning "who had me made", was a conventional formula in funerary Latin, but there is something quietly direct about it here. David Kelly junior paid for the stone, inscribed his own name upon it, and arranged to be remembered. The Barrett family, into which he had married, were an established Anglo-Norman dynasty in Connacht, which places this tomb at the intersection of Gaelic and Old English Catholic gentry in early 17th-century Mayo, a period of considerable political uncertainty for both.