The monument's end came not through deliberate destruction or the usual attrition of centuries, but through an act of misguided preservation. A tree planted too close to the structure had sent its roots beneath the stonework, slowly undermining it, until a local curate, the Reverend Richard Walsh, decided that felling the tree was the only way to save the tomb. The operation went badly. The tree fell directly onto the monument, leaving what one nineteenth-century observer described as a heap of loose but carefully dressed and still uninjured cut stone.

The tomb had been erected by Mary Purcell, referred to in earlier accounts as Madame Purcell, in memory of her husband Richard Comerford, Knight, Lord of Ballybur, who died on the 15th of June 1637. It stood against the exterior of the south wall of the medieval church of Grange, the remains of which had served as a boundary between the graveyard and the chapel avenue. The monument was an altar tomb, a chest-like funerary structure with an ornamental back panel, known as a reredos, which was framed by detached pillars resting on corbels or consoles and surmounted by an architrave and pediment. At its centre was an entablature, the horizontal band of moulding above the columns, carved to resemble a gateway. The Latin inscription cut into it called Comerford a man who had filled many public offices in both peace and war with strictest rectitude, and closed with a direct address to the reader: "O traveller, of your goodness, pray for the departed." Mary Purcell left the date of her own death blank, to be filled in later; it never was.

By the time the historian Hogan recorded all of this in detail between 1880 and 1883, the tomb was already a ruin on the ground, though the inscribed entablature remained intact. When William Carrigan came to the same site around 1905, matters had deteriorated further. He described the monument as entirely broken down and could not locate the inscribed slab at all. What had survived the roots, the falling tree, and the slow dissolution of the medieval church appears to have vanished entirely in the intervening decades, leaving only the two accounts and the text of an inscription addressed to a traveller who may no longer have anywhere to stand.