The slab, measuring 0.87 metres long and 0.55 metres wide, bears an incised text in Roman capitals, in English, commemorating a woman named Susanna. The lettering reads: HEARE LIETH THE BODY OF SUSANNA WIFE OF JAMES AGAR OF GAWRAN ESQᴿ AND DAUGHTER TO JAMES ALEXANDER GENT WHO DIED THE 24TH DAY OF MARCH 1696. The old spelling of both "Heare" and "Gawran" gives the text a period texture that no later hand has corrected.

The church in which the slab now sits was built in the nineteenth century, but it occupies the former chancel of a much older structure, the thirteenth-century church of St Mary's, Gowran. The chancel is the eastern, liturgical end of a medieval church, typically reserved for the clergy, and its reuse as the shell of a later Protestant church was not unusual in post-Reformation Ireland, where continuity of sacred ground was often maintained even as the buildings above it were remade. Susanna is identified through two men: her husband, James Agar of Gowran, and her father, James Alexander, each given the social markers of their time, Esquire and Gentleman respectively. She died on the 24th of March 1696, and the slab was set into the wall of the building that would eventually surround it on all sides.