What makes it quietly odd is an unfinished date. The inscription, raised in Roman capitals within a shallow vertical band running the length of the stone, records the burial of a Reverend Father Sir John Lalor, sometime in the 1630s, but the final digit of the year was never cut. The mason stopped, for reasons now entirely unknown, leaving the decade legible and the year permanently open.

The slab itself is a tapering limestone graveslab, just under two metres long and narrowing from roughly 83 centimetres at the head to 69 centimetres at the foot, with a thickness of 14 centimetres. The inscription sits within a depressed vertical band, slightly off-centre toward the right-hand side of the stone as viewed from above. The lettering is now difficult to make out with the naked eye, and what is known of its wording comes largely from William Carrigan's 1905 history of the diocese, in which he transcribed the text as reading, in the spelling of the original, "HERE LEYS THE REVEREND FATHER SIR JOHN LALOR 163-". The title "Sir" in this context follows an older Catholic convention, used as a courtesy form of address for a secular priest rather than indicating a knighthood. The slab is also recorded by Paul Cockerham in a 2009 publication. Beyond the name and the incomplete date, nothing further is known from surviving sources about John Lalor himself or why the carving was left unfinished.