The slab, a limestone sarcophagus lid measuring just over two metres in length, depicts a figure in outline, resting on a pillow stone and carrying a sword, its scabbard tip still smoothly intact even where the rest of the carving was deliberately obliterated. It is one of five funerary monuments recovered from the riverbed near John's Bridge in Kilkenny City during flood alleviation works in 2001, and the circumstances of its disposal tell a story that is more violent than accidental.

Archaeological excavation carried out under licence in 2001 placed the monuments in the context of the Reformation of the 1540s, when iconoclasts are thought to have defaced and dumped them in the river, targeting the sacred imagery of the old church. The closest ecclesiastical buildings, St Mary's parish church and St John's Priory, sit within a couple of hundred metres of where the stones were found, and either could plausibly have been the original home of this tomb. A competing explanation is rather more pragmatic: researchers Doyle and O'Meara have argued that the slabs were broken up and repurposed as rubble fill for the protective apron around the piers of the late medieval bridge itself, making the tomb not so much a casualty of religious fury as a quarry of convenience. Both explanations may be partly true. The slab's decoration, vine scrollwork forming interlocking fleur-de-lys along the long edges with a tendril curling around the head end, is closely comparable to bishops' effigies at Ferns and Kildare, and to the tomb of William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, made around 1230 to 1240 and still housed in Salisbury Cathedral. That comparison places this limestone lid firmly in the mid-thirteenth century, and in notably distinguished company.

The slab is currently held in storage with the National Museum of Ireland, broken into three pieces, its central figure erased to a ghost. The identity of whoever once lay beneath it remains unknown.