What remains is still remarkable: a front panel nearly two metres long, cracked almost cleanly between two of its three carved sections, each of which depicts not a scene or a figure but an architectural design. Carved stonework used as decoration on a tomb is unusual enough, but here the carvings appear to function almost as a catalogue, a sample board of the late Gothic mason's craft as it was practised in the Butler territories of Kilkenny and Tipperary during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

According to researcher O'Donovan, writing in 2012, the three panels on the tomb's front face correspond to designs that appear elsewhere across the region. The central panel depicts a vault type nearly identical to that beneath the tower at Kilkenny Dominican Friary. One panel shows a window design combining reticulation, a net-like pattern of curved tracery, with the vertical supermullions of the Perpendicular Gothic style, a design that also appears in the north gable of St Mary's itself. The third is a flamboyant Gothic design related to east windows at Clonmel and Cashel, and to the east window of the Augustinian foundation in Callan. Taken together, the panels suggest the work of a coherent school of masons operating across Butler lands and those of neighbouring lords, the tomb functioning as much as an index of their repertoire as a monument to whoever lies beneath it. The north side panel carries a heraldic shield, now heavily worn, surmounted by two close helms, that is, visored military helmets of a type fashionable in late medieval armorial display, with wreaths, mantling, and knotted cords ending in tassels. Two crests rise above: one appears to be a swan, the other the long neck and crested head of what is likely a peacock. The south panel, partially buried, is carved with the letters IHS in interlaced Black Letter script, a Christogram common in late medieval devotional contexts, with decorative interlace growing from the central upright and a knot terminating one stroke of the H.