Its Latin inscription, cut in Black Letter script along three edges of the stone, announces its own maker, as though the tomb itself is doing the talking. That detail alone sets it apart from the majority of medieval funerary slabs, which mark the dead rather than credit the craftsman or patron who commissioned them.

The slab is a tapered limestone rectangle, just over two metres long and roughly ten centimetres thick, with two cracks running across its face and a broken upper corner. Carved in relief at its centre is a seven-armed segmental fleur-de-lis cross, a design in which the arms terminate in the stylised lily-flower form associated with high medieval ecclesiastical decoration. A three-barred knop, a small ornamental knob, sits at the junction of the cross-head and shaft, and the shaft itself rests on a carved pillar-base. Superimposed on the shaft is a shield, identified by Maher in 1997 as possibly belonging to the Archdeacon family. Raised rectangular panels flank the shaft beneath the shield. The inscription running around the perimeter was transcribed by FitzGerald in the early twentieth century and translates, roughly, as: "My maker is Richard Archdeken, proctor and treasurer of this church, whose forethought adorns this church and in many ways augmented its annual revenue." Richard Archdeken, then, was not the person buried beneath the slab but the official who commissioned it, a man of sufficient standing within the medieval diocese to memorialise his own administrative achievements in stone. The Archdeacon family name, Anglicised from the Latin title for a senior church officer, suggests a dynasty that had folded ecclesiastical rank into its very identity.

The slab lies within the cathedral on the Rock of Cashel, a complex of medieval buildings that includes a round tower, a Romanesque chapel, and the Gothic cathedral itself. The choir, where the slab rests, was the part of the cathedral reserved for clergy during services, which gives some context for why a man of Archdeken's ecclesiastical rank would be commemorated there.