It is barely half a metre across in either direction and only seven centimetres thick, the surviving portion of what was once a graveslab, the kind of decorated memorial stone laid flat over a burial that was common in Irish ecclesiastical sites from the medieval period onward. What makes it worth pausing over is what it still carries: raised Latin script running along the sinister side, that is the left side as the slab would originally have been oriented, and a faint trace of a cross shaft surviving towards the centre.

The slab dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a period when the site it occupies had a rather different character. The church building today incorporates portions of a Franciscan friary that once stood here on the south bank of the River Suir, and it is within those friary grounds that the fragment has remained. Franciscan houses in Ireland were dissolved under the Tudor suppressions of the sixteenth century, though communities often persisted informally, and the physical fabric of their buildings tended to be absorbed over time into later Catholic or Protestant use. Here, the older structure was drawn into a modern church rather than left as a ruin, which means that an otherwise unremarkable parish building on Abbey Hill Road quietly contains layers going back several centuries. The graveslab, embedded where it is, sits at the junction of those layers.