The Latin inscription running around its border closes with the phrase "me fieri fecerunt", meaning "had me made", as though the stone itself is announcing its own commission. That small grammatical choice, common enough in medieval funerary Latin, gives the slab an oddly direct quality, especially lying underfoot where generations of congregants have walked over it without necessarily registering what it says.

The slab measures 1.89 metres long and 0.8 metres wide, carved in relief with a three-armed cross whose terminals end in fleurs-de-lis, the stylised lily motif long associated with Christian iconography. A crown of thorns encircles the centre of the cross-head, a sun occupies the upper right corner and a moon the upper left, and a three-barred knop, a decorative boss, sits beneath the angled band where the arms meet the shaft. The shaft itself rests on a stepped pillar base. The Black Letter inscription, that angular Gothic script familiar from late medieval manuscripts and early printed books, records the death of one Richard Henes on the 29th of December 1615. It was his brother Thomas Henes and Thomas's wife Anastasia Archer who commissioned the stone. The inscription was transcribed by Brennan in 1862 to 1863 and later translated, with some minor errors, by Knowles in 1903 and by Long in the period 1907 to 1909. The church itself is the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, a building with a long history of continuous use that has passed through several hands and denominations across the centuries.