Carved sometime in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, it has been repurposed as ordinary building material, its face turned outward and its original function as a marker for the dead quietly set aside.

The slab is cut from fossiliferous limestone, a stone dense with the compressed remains of ancient marine creatures, commonly quarried in the Kilkenny region and favoured for medieval monumental work. At some point before or during its reuse, it was punch-dressed, a process in which a pointed tool is struck repeatedly across the surface to roughen or recut it, in this case obscuring almost all of whatever decoration it once carried. What survives is a partial Latin inscription rendered in Lombardic lettering, the rounded, almost architectural script typical of medieval funerary carving in Ireland and Britain. Only a fragment remains legible on the right-hand side of the slab: a cross symbol followed by the letters HI. Whether those two letters are the opening of a name, a formula, or something else entirely, the rest has been lost to the dressing tool or to time.