The upper portion of the slab measures less than half a metre in length, but what survives is densely worked: a large IHS monogram, the Christogram derived from the Greek rendering of the name of Jesus and widely used in funerary carving from the medieval period onward, rendered in raised relief with a knot wound around the middle of the I and S, and a cross pattée, a cross whose arms flare outward at the ends, set through the bar of the H. Around the edge of the slab runs a border of Black Letter script, the angular Gothic letterform common to formal inscriptions of the period, containing a Latin epitaph. The M and F of the opening name, and the M of the Latin word for month, are elaborated with interlace, that interwoven ribbon ornament with a long tradition in Irish stonework.

The inscription begins on what heraldic convention calls the dexter side, the right side of the slab as it would have been oriented in use, with the name Margarete Fo, the surname broken or worn away beyond recovery. It continues on the sinister side and across the top: obiit 3 die mensis Julius 1601, meaning she died on the third day of the month of July 1601. One corner of the slab is broken off, taking part of the word for month with it, though enough survives to reconstruct the sense. The woman commemorated, Margarete Fo-something, died in Callan at the very end of the Elizabethan period, in a town that had by then a long established urban and ecclesiastical life. Her surname, whatever it was, is simply gone.