Pinned to the west wall of a lateral aisle off the transept, it measures just over a metre in height and preserves, on its face, the incised stem of a cross rising from a calvary of three steps. What sets it apart from a conventional memorial is what flanks that cross: on either side are occupational symbols identifying the person commemorated as a ploughman. To the left is a coulter, the vertical blade that cuts the soil ahead of a plough's share, and to the right a plough sock, the pointed iron shoe that actually turns the furrow. It is an unusually direct piece of biographical carving, marking not rank or piety alone but the labour by which a man lived.

The slab's edges are chamfered, meaning the corners have been cut away at an angle to produce a bevelled profile, and both of those sloped edges carry traces of an inscription that is no longer legible. Several comparable slabs elsewhere in the same Dominican church have been dated to the seventeenth century, and this piece almost certainly belongs to the same period and tradition. The friary itself has a much longer history, having been founded in the medieval town of Athenry, which was one of the most significant walled Anglo-Norman settlements in Connacht. By the 1600s the building had passed through periods of suppression and reuse, and the cluster of commemorative slabs now gathered inside it suggests the church remained a place of burial and local significance even through those disruptions. The ploughman slab sits just north of a window in the aisle, with another seventeenth-century slab pinned to the wall immediately to the south of the same window, making this short stretch of stonework a quiet concentration of vernacular memorial carving.