It carries no inscription, no name, no heraldic device. What it does carry is a characteristic medieval shape: the slab tapers from roughly half a metre wide at the top down to thirty-eight centimetres at the foot, its edges bevelled in the manner common to Irish funerary stonework of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At just under one and a half metres long, it is modest by any measure, and its anonymity is precisely what makes it interesting.

Scholars Bradley and Dunne, writing in 1992, recorded at least five uninscribed cross-slabs of thirteenth and fourteenth century date at the friary, a Franciscan house founded in the medieval period on the Clare River in County Galway. The group to which this slab belongs, three of which are gathered together in the same corner of the chancel, are thought to be among those five. Tapering graveslabs of this kind are a well-recognised form of medieval commemorative stonework in Ireland; the tapering profile echoes the outline of the human body, and the bevelled edge was a standard finishing technique. That none of these slabs at Claregalway bear inscriptions or imagery makes them harder to date precisely and impossible to attribute to any individual, which is itself a reminder of how much medieval commemoration has simply dissolved into the ground beneath our feet.