The inscription, carved in Latin black letter around the margins of the stone, is missing the dates of Peter Stroude's death, partly obscures his wife Margaret's name, and trails off entirely where the left edge has been broken away. What survives is a fragment of a fragment, the kind of memorial that raises more questions than it answers.

The slab itself is a mensa, the flat top surface of a chest tomb or ledger stone, cut from fossiliferous limestone, a local material dense with the outlines of ancient sea creatures. The inscription that remains identifies Peter Stroude as a burgess of the city of Kilkenny, meaning he held the formal civic status of a free citizen of the medieval borough, with the rights and obligations that entailed. Margaret, whose surname is lost, died in 1615. When Canon William Carrigan, the Kilkenny historian and priest, examined the tomb and recorded its inscription in his notebooks, now held at St Kieran's College Archive in Kilkenny, the situation was already complicated. The pulpit at that time stood at the north-east corner of the crossing and was partially covering the stone, obscuring a portion of Margaret's inscription. Carrigan dutifully noted the obstruction rather than guessing at what lay beneath, which is the reason his transcription includes the bracketed note "covered by pulpit" in the middle of the Latin text.

The result is a stone that documents its own incompleteness. The broken left edge, the pulpit that once sat over part of it, the blank spaces where a stonemason presumably expected dates to be filled in and they never were, all of it compounds into a memorial that records the fact of two lives without being able to say very much about when or how they ended.