They smashed through the cover slab, forced open the lead coffin they found inside, and left it that way. When investigators eventually looked properly at what had been disturbed, they found fabric and timber from the coffin's interior still visible, along with human skeletal remains. The damage was repaired in 2014, but the episode left behind a peculiar layering of violation and preservation that makes this otherwise plain tomb rather harder to ignore than its appearance would suggest.

The chest tomb itself is unadorned: a rectangular box of fossiliferous limestone, a stone formed from the compressed remains of ancient marine organisms and common in Irish ecclesiastical contexts, measuring just over two metres long and sitting on a moulded base with plain pilasters framing the front panel. Beneath it lies a stone vault holding disarticulated human bone, broken timber coffins, and a 19th-century coffin wrapped in studded velvet. A lead plaque fixed to the wall nearby names John Pow(w?)er O'She, with dates of February 1810 and 5 July 1859, though this inscription almost certainly refers to the coffin burial in the vault below rather than whoever was originally interred in the chest tomb above. The tomb stands on the south side of an 18th-century structure known as the Shee mausoleum, beside a Renaissance mural monument commemorating Thomas Shee and a woman named Amantissinia, possibly Anistatia, Dobbin, who died in 1636. The Shee family were prominent in Kilkenny across several centuries, and their presence here, in the ruins of a medieval chancel, gives this corner of the churchyard an unusually compressed sense of time, with memorials from different eras stacked against one another in a space that is neither fully indoors nor fully out.