That simple fact, the slab set up rather than lying flat, means half of whatever it once told us is now inaccessible, and even what remains is worn. No inscription survives to name whoever lay beneath it. What can still be read is the decoration: an incised outline cross with a trefoil, a three-lobed leaf form common in medieval ecclesiastical carving, at the terminal of each arm. Two of those trefoils, on the upper and sinister arms, only partially survive, along with the ghost of the cross-shaft itself.

The slab is one of two recorded in the north chapel, which opens off the north transept of the Cistercian abbey at Holycross. The Cistercians, a monastic order known for an austere architectural aesthetic, established the abbey in County Tipperary, and the building became a significant site of pilgrimage associated with a relic of the True Cross. The graveslab falls within a catalogue of medieval grave slabs from the county spanning the period 1200 to 1600, compiled by D. Maher, where it is listed as number ten for Holycross Abbey. The slab itself is slightly tapered, measuring 1.43 metres in length, 0.59 metres across at the top and 0.58 metres at the base, with a chamfered edge running along the sinister side. The base is broken off, an ordinary casualty of the centuries.

What makes the piece quietly affecting is precisely what it lacks. The worn surface, the missing inscription, the truncated trefoils, the face turned to the wall: collectively they describe an object that has lost the specific identity it was made to preserve, leaving only the formal vocabulary of its decoration as evidence that someone, at some point between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, was considered worth commemorating in stone.