It is not mounted on a wall or raised on a plinth; it simply lies there, level with the flagstones, measuring 1.74 metres long and 0.68 metres wide, its carved decoration still readable underfoot. That decoration is the first thing that rewards a closer look: a seven-armed cross, rendered in relief, with fleur-de-lis terminals at each arm's end, a three-barred knop at the top of the shaft, and the shaft itself set on a pillar-base form. Running around the border is a Latin inscription in Roman script, the kind of formal memorial text that medieval and early modern craftsmen cut into stone as both a prayer and a record.

The church itself was originally the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, a building whose fabric pre-dates the Reformation and which later passed into Church of Ireland use. The slab commemorates John Hackett, described in the inscription as a burgess, meaning a full citizen of a chartered town with particular trading and legal rights, and his wife, who appears in the sources under two slightly different names depending on the transcription. Davis White, writing in 1892, rendered her name as Eleanor Sall; Knowles, translating the inscription in 1903, gives her as Elicia Sall. The Latin text itself reads, in White's version, 'Hic jacet Johanes Hackett, Burges et uxor Eleanor Sall, quae obiit, A. D. 1613', and Knowles specifies that she died on the 21st of May 1613. Fethard was a prosperous walled town in the medieval period, and a burgess like Hackett would have been a figure of some local standing, his memorial slab marking that status in stone even as later generations walked across it.