What survives measures just under a metre in length and preserves a cross carved in relief, along with the ghost of an inscription that scholars have only partially managed to read: the fragments "THEIR CH" and "IL" are all that could be deciphered, the rest lost to time and damage. It is the kind of object that is easy to pass without registering, yet the incompleteness is itself the point, a 17th-century voice reduced to a handful of letters.

Bradley and Dunne, writing in 1992, identified the slab as a rectangular graveslab of 17th-century date, now surviving only in its lower portion, measuring 0.92 metres long and 0.64 metres wide. Grave slabs of this period were commonly commissioned by families of some local standing, intended to mark a burial within or close to a church or friary and to record the names of the deceased in cut or relief lettering. That the inscription here cannot be fully read means the person or family it commemorated remains anonymous, their identity dissolved into those few surviving consonants. The friary itself, at Baile Chláir in County Galway, provides the wider context, a monastic setting in which such memorial stonework would once have been relatively common, each slab a piece of personal as well as communal memory.