The rectangular graveslab, roughly 1.83 metres long and just under a metre wide, is so badly spalled, meaning the surface has flaked and fractured over time, that most of what was once carved into it has effectively disappeared. A framed coat-of-arms survives in a recessed panel at the upper end, its shield still topped by a helmet and mantling, the decorative cloth-like flourishes that flanked heraldic displays of this period. But the inscription below it is nearly gone.

When the slab was examined in November 1896, the text was still legible. It ran in small incised capitals: "Here lyeth the body of Robert Stratford Esqr who departed this life on the 26th of October 1699." That record, published by Fitzgerald between 1906 and 1908, is now the only reliable version of the inscription that exists, because only a few scattered letters remain visible on the stone itself. Robert Stratford was buried here at the close of the seventeenth century, inside the chancel of an abbey that had already been a ruin for well over a hundred years, its Cistercian community dissolved during the Tudor suppressions. The choice of a ruined chancel as a burial site was not unusual for landed families of the period; roofless or not, the sanctified ground of a former monastic church carried its own weight of meaning and social prestige.

The slab lies east to west with the head positioned to the west, following a convention common in Christian burial practice. Visitors to Baltinglass Abbey who look down at the chancel floor will find it, though without prior knowledge of the inscription there is now little to identify whose memory the stone was meant to preserve.