Not lost through flood or accident, but thrown there deliberately, faces chiselled away, figures mutilated, the stone consigned to the riverbed as an act of religious erasure. This particular fragment, measuring 1.43 metres long and just 30 centimetres thick, is a side-panel from what was likely a sarcophagus tomb, a box-shaped stone coffin of the kind used for high-status burials in late medieval Ireland. Carved onto its face is the defaced outline of a saint or angel set beneath a gabled architectural canopy, with an octagonal column rising on the left side and a smaller, now headless, angel figure tucked into the upper left corner.

The fragment was one of five partial funerary monuments pulled from the River Nore during archaeological excavations carried out in 2001 as part of the River Nore Drainage Scheme, in the area immediately north of the current John's Bridge in Kilkenny City. The two nearest ecclesiastical sites, 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 quality. Researcher N. Brady has argued that the pieces were deliberately defaced and dumped during the iconoclasm of the Reformation in the 1540s, when religious imagery in stone, glass, and paint was systematically destroyed across Ireland and Britain. A second interpretation, offered by Doyle and O'Meara, is more pragmatic and perhaps no less troubling: that the carved stones were broken up and used as rubble fill to reinforce the protective apron around the piers of the late medieval bridge, reducing sacred sculpture to engineering aggregate. Both explanations may be true at once. Comparable effigies carved within architectural canopies survive elsewhere in Ireland, including a layman at Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and a bishop at Ferns, Co. Wexford, which give some sense of the tradition to which this fragment once belonged.

The fragment is now held in storage with the National Museum of Ireland, removed from the river, catalogued, and preserved, though not on public display.