What makes this particular limestone slab stranger still is that both fragments have been sitting in St Mary's Church in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, for long enough that much of the inscription connecting them has worn to near-illegibility, leaving the story of the person it commemorates to be puzzled out from what survives.

The lower portion of the slab lies at ground-floor level in the west tower of St Mary's, while the upper portion rests in the centre of the south aisle of the nave. Together they form a straight-sided limestone slab measuring roughly 0.9 metres in length and 0.46 metres across. Cut into it in raised Black Letter script, the angular lettering style common on memorial stonework of the late medieval and early modern periods, is a Latin inscription that runs within a border and continues beneath it. The surviving text is fragmentary, but the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, pieced together a transcription from the broken parts and rendered it as: "Here lies the excellent man Thomas Co[merford], formerly Sovereign of the town of Callan, who died the day after [a date in] January or February 1627. And afterwards his wife Lettice got this monument erected." The title "Sovereign" here refers to the chief civic officer of a town, roughly equivalent to a mayor. Lettice Comerford, then, commissioned the slab after her husband's death, and her name too is worn, surviving only as a partial fragment. Some words remain barely decipherable even now, lending the inscription the quality of a sentence that keeps trailing off mid-thought.