The carver, working in very flat relief on a wedge-shaped limestone fragment, rendered the figure's right foot as a left foot. Whether this was an error, a convention, or something else entirely, nobody has been able to say.

The slab began its recorded life not in Galway at all but in County Clare, found within the walls of Dysert O'Dea church, a medieval ecclesiastical site with a famously ornate Romanesque doorway. At some point it was moved and hung on the church's external south wall, to the east of that decorative entrance. An effigial graveslab is exactly what it sounds like: a funerary slab carved with a likeness of the deceased, a form common across medieval Ireland and Britain from roughly the twelfth century onwards. This one, as described by John Hunt in his 1974 survey of Irish medieval figure sculpture, preserves only the lower half of what was probably a male figure. He wears a surcoat, a loose over-garment typical of the medieval period, its skirt flaring outward from the waist. Below the hem, the legs are just visible beneath the folds of another garment, though heavy surface exfoliation, the gradual flaking away of the stone's outer layer, has obscured most of the finer carving. The slab measures one metre in height, forty-nine centimetres wide, and six centimetres thick; its upper left section is now missing. Peter Harbison noted its original provenance in a 1971 publication, placing it firmly within the Dysert O'Dea complex before its relocation.

The piece is not on public display. Held in storage in Athenry, it is the kind of object that exists primarily in catalogues and specialist footnotes, its oddly-footed figure waiting out the years in a depot rather than a display case.