What is quietly striking about it is not its location but its blankness. Medieval grave slabs typically carried some mark of the person beneath, a cross, an effigy, a name chiselled in Latin or Norman French. This one, according to the scholar Maher writing in 1997, shows no evidence of ever having borne any design or inscription at all.

Athassel was an Augustinian house, meaning it followed the Rule of Saint Augustine and housed a community of canons rather than monks in the stricter Benedictine sense. Founded in County Tipperary, it grew into one of the largest and most prosperous medieval priories in Ireland. The chancel, where this slab rests, would have been the most sacred part of the complex, the area reserved for the altar and the clergy, and burial within it was a privilege generally reserved for significant patrons or senior members of the community. The slab itself is a tapering form, 1.77 metres long and narrowing from 0.64 metres at the head end to 0.53 metres at the foot, with a depth of roughly ten to twelve centimetres. It is the shape of a human outline rendered in stone, and yet whoever it once covered left no name behind, or perhaps never had one carved in the first place.