But one small fragment of medieval carving has ended up in an entirely more mundane situation: pressed into the retaining wall of a flower bed, holding back soil rather than marking a grave.

The piece in question is the lower half of a tapering limestone graveslab, measuring roughly 27 centimetres square at the point where it survives, broken along what would have been its left-hand edge (described in the study of medieval slabs as the sinister edge). What remains is decorated with an incised cross shaft, the kind of shallow-cut design carved directly into the stone's surface, terminating in scrolled ends. Graveslabs of this type were a common form of funerary monument in medieval Ireland, placed flat over a burial and often bearing a cross design, sometimes accompanied by inscriptions or figural ornament. This one has been re-used as building material within the retaining wall of a flower bed running inside the north-west boundary wall of St. John's graveyard in Cashel. The graveyard encloses St. John's Church of Ireland Cathedral, which itself occupies the site of a medieval church. The slab almost certainly originated somewhere within or close to that same ecclesiastical landscape, displaced at some point during the long process of building, clearing, and rebuilding that characterises sites in continuous use over centuries.