What remains is just legible enough to be haunting: a tapering, coffin-shaped piece of fossiliferous limestone, roughly the length of a tall person, its surface bearing the ghost of a woman's face framed in a pill-box head-dress with side-nets, and below it the faint trace of a cross with fleur-de-lis terminals. The detail has gone, but the outline of an identity has not, quite.

The slab is a head-slab, a type of medieval grave marker carved with the effigy or portrait of the person buried beneath, and this one is thought to date to the thirteenth century. It measures 1.72 metres in length and 0.62 metres wide, and was cut from fossiliferous limestone, a stone containing the embedded remains of ancient marine organisms, common in the Kilkenny area. The scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, described the piece in some detail, noting the chamfered edge, the pointed lower end, and the head-dress style, while acknowledging that the carving was already extremely worn and nearly illegible. Hunt recorded its original position as behind the chancel of St Mary's. The slab's more recent history is one of modest institutional shuffling: in the 1960s it was set into the concrete floor of a room in the north transept then used for displaying monuments, and in 2015 it was relocated to the south transept, where it now rests.

The woman commemorated remains anonymous. The pill-box head-dress with side-nets was a recognisable style in thirteenth-century Western Europe, placing her firmly in a period when Kilkenny was developing rapidly as a Norman town, but nothing in the surviving record names her or records her status. The slab's condition means that even the cross decoration, which Hunt could still partially describe in the 1970s, is now almost gone. What you are looking at, in effect, is a portrait that has nearly finished erasing itself.