Measuring roughly 0.9 metres by 0.73 metres, it is not a gravestone in the conventional sense but a carved heraldic panel, the kind of display piece that once announced a family's status and piety on the wall of a significant ecclesiastical building. What makes it quietly peculiar is precisely that restlessness: a stone made to stay put has been shifted, stored, and relocated more than once across the Tipperary landscape.

The stone originally formed part of the medieval cathedral at Emly, one of the oldest and most important ecclesiastical sites in Munster, a place that was the seat of a bishop long before the diocese was absorbed into Cashel in the twelfth century. When that cathedral was demolished, the stone was transferred to the church at Monard, apparently to preserve it. When the Monard church was itself demolished in 1960, according to O'Dwyer and O'Dwyer writing in 1987, the stone was finally returned to Emly. The arms it carries belong to the Hurley family. The shield displays a bend, a diagonal band crossing the face of the shield, charged with two mullets (six-pointed star shapes used in heraldry), a hand, and flanked by six crosses patée, a cross form whose arms flare outward at the tips. Above the shield rises a closed helmet shown in profile, from which a garland emerges, topped by what appears to be a bird shown close, meaning with its wings folded, bearing a cross patée on its breast. Carved beneath the shield in Roman capitals is the Latin motto DEXTRA CRUCE VINCET, translated as "My right hand conquers by the cross."

The stone sits in plain view on the north face of the graveyard wall, near the west end of the Catholic church, where it stands alongside the seventeenth-century plaque. The heraldic detail rewards a close look: the layering of symbols, the motto's confident tone, and the bird perched atop the helmet all speak to a family that understood exactly how to use carved stone to make an argument about itself.