The limestone slab mounted on the north wall of Kilcooly Abbey's chancel does none of these things. There are no letters, no numerals, no heraldic device that might anchor it to a particular person or era. What it offers instead is a cross with seven arms, a configuration that sits well outside the standard vocabulary of Irish funerary carving, surrounded by stylised fleurs-de-lys and anchored at its centre by a starburst motif. The arms, all except the two lowest, extend outward to meet the border of the carved panel itself, so the design reads less like an object placed within a frame and more like something pressing against its own edges. Below the cross-head, where a shaft would normally run plain, there is instead an expanded lozenge, a diamond-shaped swelling that adds one more small strangeness to an already unusual object.

The slab is a tapering piece of limestone, 1.62 metres long and 0.63 metres wide at its broadest point, chamfered on all sides except the base, where the stone is cut at an angle rather than square. It now sits secured to the chancel wall of Kilcooly Abbey, a Cistercian house in County Tipperary, positioned between two recesses in the stonework. Cistercian abbeys were generally austere in their decoration, the order's founding spirit pushing back against ornament, yet Kilcooly accumulated a remarkable collection of carved stonework over the centuries. This slab fits uneasily into any obvious category within that collection, and the absence of any inscription means the person it once covered, if it ever lay horizontal over a grave at all, remains entirely unknown.