Its narrow end is gone, one corner is missing, and the cross incised into its face is incomplete. Yet what survives is quietly remarkable: two lines of inscription carved in Lombardic lettering, a formal script associated with medieval monumental stonework, running along the sides of the slab. One reads, in Latin, "Here lies Thomas Scor[thals]"; the other, more fully preserved, reads "Here lies Thomas fitz Simon Serthals". The second inscription uses the medieval convention of "fitz", from the Norman French for "son of", identifying the deceased as Thomas, son of Simon Serthals. Together, these two worn lines of text represent the oldest known inscriptions bearing the Shortall name.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his history of the diocese of Ossory, identified both inscriptions and placed them in the thirteenth century. He connected them to the Shortall family of Upper Clara, a local landed family whose name would eventually become well established in the Kilkenny area. The variant spellings, Scorthals and Serthals, reflect the instability of surname spelling in medieval Ireland, particularly for families of Norman origin still settling into the landscape and its record-keeping. That two members of the family appear on what may be a single slab, or at least in the same churchyard context, suggests Clara held some significance for them at an early point in their history in the region. For a family whose later presence in Kilkenny is reasonably well documented, this fragment offers an unusually early glimpse, one where the name itself is still finding its form in stone.