The slab at Ballytarsna, in County Tipperary, measures just 55 centimetres by 94 centimetres and is only 22 centimetres thick, yet it carries the name of a man who died more than three centuries ago, placed now in the grass outside the northern wall of the enclosure rather than over any identifiable grave.

The slab is dedicated to Humphrey Pyke, who died in 1682, and is cut from the same local limestone that forms the rubble wall enclosing the rectangular graveyard. A medieval church sits north of centre within that enclosure, and the slab lies near the church's eastern end. The landscape around it is layered with older occupation: a tower house, the kind of fortified residential structure that became common across Ireland from the late medieval period, stands roughly 350 metres to the north, while a moated site and a ringfort lie around 430 metres to the east. A moated site, in this context, typically refers to a raised medieval platform surrounded by a water-filled or earthwork ditch, often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement. That Humphrey Pyke's name was thought worth carving into stone in 1682 places him in the generations immediately following the upheavals of the seventeenth century, when formal commemoration of the dead in durable materials was itself a statement of some social standing, however modest the scale of this particular memorial.

The graveyard sits at the southern end of a north-south ridge of rock outcrop, in gently rolling countryside that opens out in most directions. The church ruin and its surrounding wall are the main focus, and the graveslab, small and easily overlooked in the grass just outside the wall, rewards a closer look for anyone who finds their way there.