At roughly two thirds of a metre square, it is not a large stone, but its iconography is arresting. The pairing of celestial bodies with a cross is an old devotional convention, evoking the darkness said to have fallen at the Crucifixion, and here it has been rendered with quiet precision by a carver working sometime in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

The cross form on this slab closely resembles that on a dated graveslab in St. Mary's Church in Clonmel, a few miles to the west along the River Suir, which carries a date of 1592. That parallel gives a reasonable anchor for the Kilsheelan stone, even though its own date is not recorded. The slab has a second life inscribed on its reverse: in 1792, nearly two centuries after the front face was carved, the back of the stone was pressed into service again for the burial of a woman named Judith Connell. The reuse was entirely practical, a piece of already-dressed stone turned around and given a new purpose, but it means the slab now carries two distinct moments of remembrance, separated by the better part of two hundred years, on opposite faces of the same piece of rock.

The church sits at the eastern edge of Kilsheelan village, just south of the main road and immediately north of the Suir, and the slab remains in situ within the nave.