Cut into the stone in eight lines of English are the words asking the reader to pray for the soul of Donogh, who died on the 22nd of March, with a year that even close inspection leaves ambiguous, reading as either 1723 or 1728. That uncertainty alone would be mildly interesting, but the slab has a stranger quality: the inscription itself appears to have been carved over earlier decoration, which means the stone was almost certainly re-used, given a new identity and a new name while its original purpose was partially erased.

The slab is trapezoidal in shape, which was the standard form for the lid of a coffin tomb, a raised chest-style monument common in medieval and early modern Irish ecclesiastical settings. Despite the 18th-century date in the inscription, the overall style of the carving points to an earlier origin, most likely the 17th century. Beneath the weathered surface, traces of interlace-like ornament and the shaft of a cross are still faintly visible, motifs more consistent with that earlier period than with the plainer conventions of the 1720s. A shallow moulding runs along all the edges, formed by two parallel grooves, and the proportions of the stone closely resemble two other graveslabs in the same church, one also displayed on the north wall of the nave, the other in the south chapel. The slab is largely intact, with only a section of the top-right corner missing.

The friary itself was founded by the Dominican order in Sligo in the 13th century and remained an important site of burial and commemoration through the medieval and post-medieval periods. The practice of re-using older funerary stones was not unusual; stone was a durable and costly material, and an existing slab could be rededicated with minimal effort, even if that meant cutting new letters across the ghost of an older design. In Donogh's case, whoever commissioned the inscription either did not know or did not mind that the stone beneath their words had already marked someone else's death.