When drainage works along the River Nore were carried out between 2001 and 2003, archaeologists recovered thirteen graveslabs from the riverbed, each one apparently stripped from a nearby graveyard and repurposed as rubble to reinforce the protective apron around the piers of a late medieval bridge. The logic was purely structural: flat stone is flat stone, regardless of what words or symbols it once carried.

One fragment in particular offers a small, precise window onto medieval Kilkenny. A roughly shaped piece of limestone, just under half a metre long and less than ten centimetres thick, it carries an incised cross whose shaft widens at one point into a small circle, with what appears to be a trefoil terminal, a three-lobed decorative end common in medieval stonework, surviving just above. The style places it in the 13th or 14th century, a period when both St Mary's parish church, roughly a hundred metres to the west, and St John's Priory, about two hundred metres to the north-east, were active religious sites with their own burial grounds. Either could have been the source. The graveslabs appear to have been deliberately cleared, not simply lost to flood or erosion, which means someone at some point made a deliberate decision to dismantle a graveyard and feed its markers into a construction project. Whether that was considered unremarkable at the time, or whether it was the kind of thing done quietly and quickly, is not recorded.

The current whereabouts of this particular fragment are unknown. It was catalogued, measured, and described during the excavation, and then, apparently, it slipped from the record entirely. What survives is the description itself, a set of dimensions and a careful account of a partial cross on a broken stone, standing in for an object that may or may not still exist somewhere in Kilkenny.