" The slab commemorates one Theobald Butler, grandson of Sir Richard Butler of Knocktoher, who died on the 20th of March 1672. What makes it quietly arresting is not just its age but its craftsmanship and its current whereabouts, which are unknown. When inspectors visited to record it, the stone could not be found.

The graveyard itself sits immediately east of the main road through Bansha, a raised, sub-rectangular enclosure with a pronounced central mound, the kind of earthwork that often signals far older activity beneath a later structure. An 18th or 19th-century church occupies that mound. The Butler graveslab was recorded as standing at the east end of the church, and its description, drawn from Ordnance Survey letters of 1840 and a later transcription by Seymour writing between 1917 and 1920, is detailed enough to suggest something genuinely fine. The inscription runs in raised lettering around the perimeter of the slab, and the decoration features an eight-pointed cross whose arms terminate in fleur-de-lys, with the conventional emblems of the Crucifixion, likely the lance and sponge, flanking the shaft. Seymour noted the lettering as being in "raised Roman characters," a relatively formal choice for a provincial memorial of the period. The Butlers of Knocktoher were a branch of one of the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in Munster, which lends the stone a wider historical context, though Theobald himself leaves little other trace in the record.

The graveyard is accessible from the road through the village, with the Ara River running to the north. Whether the slab has been moved, buried, or simply obscured within the graveyard is not recorded. It may yet be there, face-down in the grass or leaning against an interior wall, waiting for someone to look carefully enough.