The slab lies at the eastern end of the former chancel of what was once the parish church of St John the Baptist in Fethard, now Holy Trinity Church of Ireland. It is a substantial piece of work, a rectangular limestone slab measuring 2.1 metres long and 0.75 metres wide, decorated with a seven-armed segmental-headed cross whose terminals end in fleur-de-lis ornaments. Knops, small decorative rounded projections, mark the base of the cross-head and the base of the cross-shaft, and the cross-base itself shifts in shape from rectangular at the bottom to triangular above. Running around the border and up the cross-base and shaft, in the angular Black Letter script common to late medieval stonecutting, is a Latin inscription that frames the whole slab as a kind of prospective epitaph.

The inscription commemorates Robert Nale, described as superior of Fethard, and his wife Johanna Everard. The Latin text, transcribed and translated by various antiquarians across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, makes explicit that the couple commissioned the slab themselves before their deaths, in the year 1552. Robert outlived its making by nearly a decade, dying in 1561. The phrasing is quietly arresting: the slab speaks in the first person, the stone itself saying that the couple had it made. Scholars have not always agreed on the details; a transcription published by Long in 1907 to 1909 reads Robert's surname as Vale rather than Nale, a discrepancy that has never been fully resolved. The title superior of Fethard, or superior of Federd as the Latin has it, placed Robert in a position of civic or ecclesiastical authority in the town, though the precise nature of that role is not spelled out on the stone itself.