Nearly two metres long and tapering slightly from head to foot, it bears a seven-armed cross with fleur-de-lis terminals, a decorative form in which each arm of the cross ends in the stylised three-petalled motif familiar from heraldry. At the junctions where the cross-head meets the shaft, and again where the shaft meets the base, small knops and a pillar-base form punctuate the design, giving the whole composition a considered, almost architectural rhythm. Running along the left and right edges of the slab, in the angular Black Letter script common to late medieval stonework, an inscription records the name of the person buried beneath. It is worn nearly to invisibility, but enough survives to suggest it once read, in Latin, something close to: here lies Jacob Butler, 1597.

The slab is one of three grouped together in the chancel of the Cistercian abbey at Holycross, a monastery founded on the banks of the River Suir and long associated with a relic of the True Cross that drew medieval pilgrims in considerable numbers. It appears as number eight in D. Maher's catalogue of medieval grave slabs from the abbey, which covers the period 1200 to 1600. The likely date of 1597, if correctly read, would place this burial at the very end of that range, and the surname Butler connects the deceased to the powerful Anglo-Norman dynasty that dominated much of Munster and Leinster throughout the medieval period. Whether the surviving stonework is the work of a local carver or part of a broader regional tradition of slab production in Tipperary is not certain from what remains, but the quality of the decoration suggests someone of means and local significance.