Standing nearly two metres above the ground and almost a metre wide, it carries a seven-armed cross rendered in relief, its terminals finished in the fleur-de-lis motif common to high-status commemorative work of the period. What makes it stranger is the inscription: cut in Roman lettering, the text spirals around the border before continuing up the cross-shaft and band, threading the stone's geography as though the words could not be contained in a single margin.

The inscription commemorates James Butler, Esquire, son to the Lord Baron of Dunboyne, who died on the last day of November 1619. It was his wife, Dame Ellen, described as daughter of Sir Walter Butler, Earl of Ormonde, who commissioned the slab in his memory, the wording making her grief explicit: she is named as his "mourning wife". The Butler connection places this stone firmly within the dense web of aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage that shaped the medieval and early modern town of Fethard. The slab also has a minor scholarly history of its own. A nineteenth-century transcription by Brennan, published in the early 1860s, wrongly identified Dame Ellen's father as Sir Walter O'Brian, Earl of Thomond, a significant genealogical error, and the accompanying sketch misrepresented the layout of the text on the stone. It was not until Knowles published a corrected transcription in 1903 that the record was set straight, a reminder that even a fixed object in stone can carry a long tail of misreading.