The figure is that of Sir Thomas de Tuite, carved in low relief and measuring just over 1.6 metres in length. Running along the long sides of the slab, in gothic lettering, is a Latin inscription that leaves little ambiguity: here lies Thomas de Tuite, Knight, once lord of Kentstown, who died on the second day of June 1363. It is a precise and personal survival, the kind of medieval detail that tends not to outlast the centuries intact.

The settlement's ecclesiastical history runs considerably deeper than the current building. The church of the 'vill de Kent' appears in the taxation records of Pope Nicholas IV, compiled between 1302 and 1306, which catalogued church revenues across Ireland and England, making it a useful index of which parishes were functioning at the time. By 1622, the archbishop James Ussher was describing the building as ruined, with only the chancel in any kind of repair, and that repair described as indifferent. Sixty years later, the bishop Anthony Dopping noted that it had gone untouched since 1641, and was not even enclosed. The present church was built around 1750, when Kentstown became the head of a union with the neighbouring parishes of Danestown and Ballymagarvey. No physical trace of any earlier structure has been identified within the subrectangular graveyard that surrounds it, defined by masonry walls and measuring roughly 55 metres north to south.

The de Tuite effigy, then, has outlasted everything around it. Whatever church Thomas de Tuite was interred to commemorate has long since vanished, leaving his carved slab to be absorbed into a successor building constructed nearly four centuries after his death. The church sits at the crest of a south-facing slope, with the Nanny River running west to east about 150 metres below, a quiet piece of County Meath topography that has quietly accumulated rather more history than its present appearance might suggest.