It is carved with an eight-pointed cross in relief running down its centre, surrounded by an unusually busy programme of decoration: gothic windows, groining (the ribbed intersections characteristic of vaulted ceilings), geometric figures, and an inverted shield bearing a cross saltire. That inversion is quietly strange, either a deliberate heraldic choice or a sign that the slab was at some point repositioned without much ceremony. The date has been worn away entirely, but the raised Black Letter inscription cut along either side of the central cross has survived well enough to be largely legible.

The inscription was recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, and he read it as commemorating Richard fitz Moryss and Johanna Whytte, his wife, with a date beginning "A.D. 1" before the stone goes blank. Carrigan felt confident assigning it to the second half of the fifteenth century on stylistic grounds. The formula "fitz Moryss" follows the medieval Anglo-Norman naming convention indicating "son of Maurice", and the pairing of surnames, one seemingly of Norman origin and one Hiberno-English, gives a small glimpse into the mixed cultural world of late medieval Kilkenny. The slab was almost certainly a prestige commission: floor slabs of this elaborateness were expensive objects, placed where the congregation would walk over them, keeping the dead symbolically present beneath the living. Carrigan also noted a second medieval graveslab and the mensa, the flat top stone, of a sixteenth-century chest tomb elsewhere in the same graveyard, suggesting that Burnchurch was a burial site of some local significance across several generations.