A limestone slab barely larger than a sheet of notebook paper once marked a grave in the churchyard of St. Michael's parish church in Athy, yet the carving pressed into its surface is anything but incidental. Measuring just 28 centimetres long and 22 centimetres wide, the piece carries a crucifixion scene worked in false relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to leave the image raised without being fully three-dimensional. The result is spare and immediate: a figure nailed to a Latin cross, arms stretched upward and splayed wide, the head tilted onto the right shoulder in the familiar posture of death, and around the waist an elaborate perizonium, the draped cloth that became a standard feature of devotional crucifixion imagery in Western Christian art.

The slab dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a period when small carved grave-markers of this kind were produced across Ireland, often combining personal piety with considerable craft in a modest format. The perizonium here is described as elaborate, suggesting the carver brought real attention to what could easily have been a cursory detail. At some point the stone left the graveyard at St. Michael's and is now kept at the Athy Heritage Centre and Museum in Emily Square, where it can be seen properly rather than weathering further in open ground. The move preserves something that, given its size, could easily have been lost altogether.