That occupational imagery, rare and specific, was once a way of identifying the deceased by their trade rather than their coat of arms, a kind of stone-cut professional portrait. The slab also carried a marginal inscription asking prayers for the souls of Walter Lang and his wife Sara Gavna, dated 1696.

The slab was documented by Bradley and Dunne in 1992, at which point it was recorded as sitting within the nave of the friary at Baile Chláir, a Franciscan house whose remains still stand in the town known in English as Claregalway. The inscription follows the conventions of post-Reformation Catholic memorial lettering, the appeal to pray for souls reflecting the doctrine of purgatory that the Reformation had rejected but that remained central to Irish Catholic devotional practice. Walter Lang and Sara Gavna are otherwise unknown, but the butcher's tools carved alongside their names suggest a family connected to the meat trade, memorialising themselves in the idiom of their working life rather than any heraldic identity. When the site was inspected again in June 2018, the slab could not be located. It may have been moved, covered, or lost in the intervening years, which gives the whole thing an appropriately elusive quality: a monument to two people, asking to be remembered, that has itself slipped from view.