Not a body, but a carved limestone effigy of one: a sarcophagus lid nearly two metres long, depicting a figure in a cloth tunic and cloak, a sword scabbard still visible at his lower left side. The head is gone, the upper surface deliberately defaced, and where a heraldic shield would once have identified the man, there is now only damaged stone. It is an object that survived being broken, thrown into a river, and buried in silt, only to surface during flood alleviation works in 2001, and it now sits in storage with the National Museum of Ireland.

The lid was one of five partial funerary monuments recovered from the River Nore during archaeological excavations at John's Bridge, Kilkenny, carried out as part of the River Nore Drainage Scheme. The excavations, directed by N. Brady of the Archaeological Diving Company, found these pieces associated with the late medieval bridge immediately north of the current John's Bridge. Two explanations have been put forward for how they ended up there. Brady suggests they were deliberately defaced and dumped in the river by iconoclasts during the Reformation in the 1540s, a period when religious imagery, particularly the veneration of the dead in church settings, attracted the hostility of reformers. Doyle and O'Meara offer a more pragmatic reading: that the monuments were broken up and repurposed as rubble to reinforce the protective apron around the bridge piers, which would make them useful fill rather than targets of theological outrage, though the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. The nearest churches, St Mary's parish church roughly 100 metres to the west and St John's Priory approximately 200 metres to the northeast, are the most plausible original homes for monuments of this type and quality. The slab itself had already been repaired before it was discarded, with mismatching masonry inserted at the foot end, suggesting a complicated history even before the Reformation reached it.