The fragment is small, roughly 40 by 30 centimetres, but its black-letter script carries enough detail to be tantalising: the words "die Septembris" and the year 1542, along with a partial number, 93, which may represent a second date or possibly the age of the person commemorated. Whoever was being memorialised on that September day in 1542 has otherwise been forgotten entirely.

The slab originated on the grounds of St John's Priory, a house of the Augustinian canons, an order of clergy following the Rule of St Augustine who established communities across medieval Ireland. When the priory fell into decline, its stonework became a resource. In 1818, a building known as Evans' Asylum, or Evan's Home, was constructed on the same grounds, and the graveslab, already broken and presumably displaced from its original context, was pressed into service as an ordinary building material. It was set into the masonry of the north projecting bay, near the north-west angle of the H-plan structure, at a height of just over 2.6 metres above ground. It has remained there ever since. The building was refurbished and reopened in 2020 as the Butler Gallery, giving the wall, and the quietly extraordinary fragment embedded in it, a new public life.