What makes it unusual is not just the inscription but what fills the space inside it: carved occupational symbols showing a ploughman at work, along with a plough sock and coulter, the iron cutting blade and share that turn soil ahead of the plough body. It is rare to find such explicitly agricultural imagery on a memorial slab, and the choice suggests a family that took real pride in the work of the land.

The slab, which measures 1.56 metres in length and roughly 0.74 metres across at its widest point, sits at the western end of the nave aisle, third in a row of four slabs running north to south from the north wall. Its bottom left corner is broken. The inscription running around its perimeter was transcribed by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1913 and reads, with some letters lost to damage: "Pray for the souls of Hugh Higenn and Novlle Conenn his wife and his son Thomas Higenn and Donell Higenn and their posterity, 1684." The Higenn family, then, were commemorated collectively, across at least two generations, in a single carved stone. The name Novlle Conenn, likely a woman of the Connon family, suggests the kind of intermarriage between local Connacht families that was common in the period. The church itself, a Dominican friary founded in Athenry during the medieval period, continued to serve as a burial place for local families well into the seventeenth century, even as religious life under such institutions had been severely disrupted by that point.

The slab is accessible within the church ruins at Athenry, where it lies in situ among the other floor slabs. Visitors who know to look for it will find it by counting from the north wall, though the carved imagery of the ploughman is best appreciated in raking light, when the shallow relief becomes readable against the stone's surface.