Rather than running text around the margins of the covering slab in the conventional way, the Latin epitaph on the mensa, the flat upper surface of the chest tomb, is placed along the front edge instead, positioned specifically so that a person standing before it could read it without difficulty. It is a small, deliberate choice, and it tells you something about the kind of monument this was always meant to be: one designed to be encountered and understood, not simply to exist.

The monument commemorates Theobald Butler of Tennehinch, the sixth son of Edmund Butler, second Viscount Mountgarret, who died on the eleventh of March 1643. His wife, Leticia Geraldine, described in the inscription as a granddaughter of the Earl of Kildare, is named alongside him. The mensa slab carries a raised cross of the cross-crosslet form, meaning each arm of the cross bears its own transverse bar, with three additional bars of decreasing size crossing the shaft toward the base. Carved into the stepped base of that cross is a skull, referencing Golgotha, the place of the skull in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion. Above the tomb, a mural slab in a chamfered frame carries a separate Latin elegy in raised black letter script, dated the sixth of May 1635, and records that Theobald himself commissioned it during his lifetime. The combination of the two dates, one eight years before the other, is quietly striking: a man inscribing his own memorial while still alive, then dying to complete it.

The fallen front panel of the chest tomb, which now lies flat before the monument rather than standing upright, is carved with the Arma Christi, the instruments of the Passion, arranged across three compartments divided by round-headed arches. A ladder rises through the central panel, flanked by scourges on one side and a seamless robe with three dice on the other. Two horizontal rows of thirty pieces of silver divide this section from the lower panel below. In the side compartment, three hearts arranged to suggest a shamrock shape appear near a cock on a pot, imagery that has prompted scholarly discussion about whether the shamrock here carries Trinitarian meaning. The dexter panel shows a plain cross on a stepped base with scourging pillars on either side, both taller than the cross itself. The cumulative effect is dense and deliberate, a carved lexicon of suffering and redemption worked into stone for a family of considerable standing, left now in a corner of a ruined church for whoever happens to look closely enough.