Agricultural tools were occasionally carved onto medieval and early modern gravestones, typically to indicate the trade or livelihood of the deceased, and this particular choice gives the stone a quietly grounded, workaday character quite distinct from the heraldic or devotional imagery more commonly found in church interiors.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister recorded the slab in 1913, it was complete, if considerably worn, and still legible enough to read an inscription along the sinister side, the left side as you face the stone, naming Daniel Nolan and giving a date of 1700. That inscription is now illegible. The slab itself has since broken into two pieces, and a section from the lower portion is missing entirely. It measures roughly 1.54 metres in length and tapers from about 0.54 metres wide at the top to 0.38 metres at the base, a shape typical of grave covers from the medieval and post-medieval period. The church it rests in is the Dominican priory of Athenry, founded in the thirteenth century and one of the better-preserved examples of mendicant architecture in the west of Ireland.

The slab sits to the north of a second wall monument in the same stretch of nave wall, which helps locate it if you are moving through the interior. The damage it has sustained since Macalister's time is a reminder of how much quiet erosion these objects endure, in situ and largely unguarded, across the centuries.