Beneath it, sealed within a stone vault, lie disarticulated human bones, broken timber coffins, and a 19th-century coffin still wrapped in studded velvet. The monument itself is contained within a late 18th-century enclosure known as the Shee mausoleum, so that what you are looking at is a layering of centuries, each one folded into the next.

The monument was erected in memory of Thomas Shee and his wife, whose name appears in the Latin inscription as Amantissinia Dobbin, though the precise form of her first name remains uncertain. She died on 21 October 1636. The inscription identifies Thomas as the son of one Richard Shee, a knight, and as a former mayor of Kilkenny city. A mural monument of this kind, common in Renaissance funerary practice, typically combines a chest tomb, the box-shaped structure at the base traditionally associated with the body, with an inscribed slab mounted on the wall above. This example is built from fossiliferous limestone, a stone embedded with the remains of ancient marine creatures, and its design is largely plain: undecorated pilasters, chamfered edges on the flat tomb slab, and a round-arched canopy fitted into the blocked window above, part of which has since been patched with red brick. A reused fragment of an earlier chest tomb panel bearing the IHS monogram, a Christogram widely used in Catholic devotional contexts, has been incorporated into the base, suggesting older stonework was repurposed in its construction.

What makes the monument especially arresting is not its architecture but its damage. Both Latin inscriptions have been badly defaced by graffiti, leaving the texts only partially legible. More deliberately, three areas of what appear to have been raised decorative carvings were carefully removed using fine chisel work, the marks still visible on the stone surface. A layer of plaster was also applied over the inscribed panel, possibly to obscure the text, suggesting the defacement was not incidental vandalism but something closer to an act of systematic erasure. Who did this, and why, has not been established.