The slab itself is nearly two metres long and just under eighty centimetres wide, broken horizontally across its face about one and a half metres from the top, and the carving that can be read is a later copy of something that had worn or faded away entirely.

The text, incised in Roman script, records the death of Thomas Price, Archbishop of Cashel, who died on 4 August 1685 at the age of eighty-five. The Latin reads, in translation, that here lies the body of the Reverend Father in Christ Thomas Price, lately Archbishop of Cashel, who died on the day before the Nones of August 1685, aged 85. Price held one of the most senior positions in the Church of Ireland hierarchy at a period of considerable political turbulence in Ireland, and his grave sits in the graveyard of a medieval church that was itself later replaced by St John's Church of Ireland Cathedral. The Bolton Library, beside which the slab rests, is one of the oldest intact collections of early printed books in Ireland, which gives the immediate surroundings an unusual density of historical layering. At the bottom of the slab, on the left-hand side, the word 'RESCRIPT' appears alongside the date 1875, indicating that the inscription was recut in that year because the original seventeenth-century lettering had become illegible. Below that, a second date, 1965, has been added, suggesting the slab received some further attention or recording almost a century later. The visible epitaph, then, is not quite what Price's contemporaries would have read; it is a Victorian restoration of a text that time had erased, itself then annotated in the mid-twentieth century.