It is, in the formal language of stone recording, uninscribed, and that silence is in many ways its most arresting quality. Someone commissioned this slab, someone was buried under it, and yet the identity of that person has been entirely lost to time.

The slab is thought to date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when Ardfert was a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance, home to a Hiberno-Romanesque cathedral dedicated to Saint Brendan and to a community of Franciscan friars. The stone itself is limestone, tapering in the manner typical of medieval funerary slabs, wider at the shoulder end and narrowing toward the feet. It measures 218 centimetres in length and between 58 and 79 centimetres in width, with a thickness of 16 centimetres, making it a substantial piece of worked stone. Its edges are moulded, meaning the mason shaped a decorative profile along the borders rather than leaving them plain, which suggests a degree of care and expense in its production. That craft, combined with its placement within the chancel, the most sacred part of a church and typically reserved for clergy or high-status patrons, implies the person commemorated held some rank or standing in their community. The absence of an inscription is not unusual for the period; literacy was far from universal, and many medieval slabs relied on imagery rather than text to mark a grave. Here, even the imagery is gone, if it ever existed.