It is the mensa, the flat top slab, of a chest tomb, a box-shaped raised monument of the kind common in medieval Irish ecclesiastical settings, and it survives only in part: roughly 65 centimetres long, 95 centimetres wide, and 20 centimetres thick. What makes it worth pausing over is the carving on its surface, a four-armed fleur-de-lys cross enclosed within an inner circle, with portions of the original decorative border still legible on either side. It is a small, worn thing, but the quality of that motif suggests it once belonged to something considerably grander.

The connection to a specific tomb was noted as early as 1905, when the ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan included a reference to a tomb at Donaghmore in the second volume of his history of the diocese of Ossory. The fragment as it survives today may well be a remnant of that same monument, though the identification is not certain. Carrigan was writing at a time when many such pieces were still partly traceable, and his four-volume work remains a significant source for the medieval church sites of Kilkenny. The fleur-de-lys cross form, with its stylised lily-shaped terminals, was a motif used across late medieval funerary carving in Ireland, lending the piece a broader context even as its original patron remains unknown.