It is there no longer, or at least nobody can say with confidence where it has gone. What makes the loss particularly frustrating is what the slab contained: a partially defaced Latin epitaph, one edge deliberately chiselled away, commemorating a man of considerable standing in late sixteenth-century Kilkenny, and possibly two men at once.

The slab, dated to around 1580, bore a raised eight-pointed cross fleury, a decorative cross form with fleur-de-lis terminals, set on a graduated base and running down the centre of the stone. The surviving portion of the inscription, recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, identifies one Nicholas Garvey as a former burgess of Kilkenny, a bachelor of both civil and canon law, and an ecclesiastical official serving simultaneously in the dioceses of Dublin and Ossory, with some further role in the regional administration of the Crown's chancery. The Latin phrase "utriusque iuris" signals training in both bodies of law, a mark of serious legal education in the period. Carrigan identified this Nicholas Garvey as the same man pardoned on 7 July 1574, likely in the context of the political turbulence of the Elizabethan period in Leinster. A chest tomb or ledger of this kind was a flat slab, sometimes raised on a rectangular stone box, used to mark the burial place of someone of civic or ecclesiastical importance. But the epitaph appears to do double duty: Carrigan concluded that a second person is also commemorated, almost certainly Robert Garvie of Kilkenny, described elsewhere as professed in civil law, though the damaged state of the inscription makes the precise relationship between the two men difficult to determine.

The slab was recorded near the north wall of the chancel at St Mary's, but its current whereabouts are unknown. Whether it was moved during later alterations to the church, buried beneath later floor surfaces, or simply lost, remains unclear. The deliberate chiselling away of one inscribed edge adds another layer of ambiguity; somebody, at some point, had a reason to erase part of what was written there.