It looks, at first, like decorative stonework belonging to the wall itself. It does not. What is set into that masonry is a piece of a chest tomb, a free-standing box-shaped monument of the kind that was fashionable among wealthy and ecclesiastical patrons in late medieval Ireland, predating the wall around it by the better part of three centuries.

The fragment is part of a front panel carved from fossiliferous limestone, a stone formed from ancient marine sediment dense with the compressed remains of sea creatures, which gives it a faintly textured surface even before any chisel touched it. The decoration consists of pointed niches, Gothic in character, enclosing foliate motifs rendered in false relief, meaning the carving creates the impression of depth without actually cutting deeply into the stone. The style points to the sixteenth century, a period when Kilkenny was a prosperous urban centre with the craftsmen and the patronage to produce sophisticated funerary carving. By 1804, when the cross wall dividing the graveyard was built, the original monument had evidently been lost or broken up, and this surviving panel was incorporated into the new structure as a convenient piece of dressed stone, its carved face pressed outward and visible but its original context long gone. It may once have belonged to the same tomb as another fragment recorded separately in the vicinity, suggesting the monument was substantial before it was dismembered.