Someone, at some point, took a chisel to its edges specifically to make it fit its current position in the floor. The upper border was cut clean across, taking the tops of the letters with it, so that what survives is less than was ever intended to be read.

The slab, measuring roughly 94 centimetres long by 83 centimetres wide, carries an unusually inventive cross-head carved in the form of a shield, curved and without a base, from whose angles project five simplified fleur-de-lys. The spaces between them are filled with a trefoil or quatrefoil in shallow relief, and a vertical cross-arm runs through the centre of the shield, narrowing as it descends to a small circular knop, a rounded terminal boss that marks the end of the cross. The incised lettering is in Black Letter, the angular script common to formal inscriptions of the period, and it is in Latin. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, transcribed what remained as "Hic jacet Johannes Nongle….sub marmore duro" and translated the phrase as "Here, under the unfeeling marble, lies John Nongle." Further text is partially visible, with the fragment "ella" inscribed vertically within the right-hand border, and to the left of the knop the Christogram "IHS" appears in the same script. The slab is dated on stylistic grounds to the mid to late sixteenth century, placing it in a period when elaborate carved memorial slabs were being produced across Kilkenny for merchant and gentry families. John Nongle's identity beyond his name has not survived the cutting away of the stone, and whatever "ella" once completed, whether a name or a phrase, is now irrecoverable.