The piece is small, roughly half a metre wide and just over two-thirds of a metre tall, and it is cracked horizontally through the middle, severing the carved figure it depicts at the neck. Yet what survives is remarkably precise: a depiction of St Catherine of Alexandria, rendered in false relief, a technique in which the figure appears to project from the surface but is actually carved into a slightly recessed field, giving a sculptural effect without fully undercutting the stone.

The fragment belongs to an effigial tomb, a type of medieval monument in which a recumbent effigy of the deceased was flanked or surrounded by carved decorative panels, often featuring saints in niched arcading. This particular panel would originally have been divided into a series of ogee-headed niches, the ogee being the characteristic S-curved arch of late medieval Gothic ornament. St Catherine occupies the first niche. She holds a sword pointing downward in her left hand and a book in her right, wears a crown, and her hair falls in thick plaits over each shoulder. Behind the folds of her garment, her wheel is just visible, the instrument of her legendary martyrdom and her most recognisable attribute. The spandrels, the triangular spaces between the arch and its surrounding frame, are filled with foliate carving, also in relief. Based on stylistic analysis, John Hunt's 1974 survey of Irish medieval figure sculpture assigned the fragment a sixteenth-century date, placing it in the final decades before the dissolution of the monasteries and the rapid decline of this kind of elaborate tomb craft in Ireland.

The stone is kept within the chancel of St Mary's, a church with its own considerable medieval fabric, and the fragment can be seen there alongside other architectural and funerary survivals from the site. The break across the middle and the loss of the surrounding panels make it easy to pass over, but looked at closely, the carving holds its detail with some tenacity, the plait of hair, the wheel half-hidden in drapery, the downward sword all still legible after five centuries.