It is poorly preserved, its surface yielding little to the eye, and no one has been close enough to measure it or read whatever markings may once have been carved into it. That inaccessibility is itself a kind of record, a reminder that even in a well-visited medieval structure, certain things remain just out of reach.

The slab sits in the first chapel of the north transept, to the north of the chancel of Holycross Abbey. The abbey, a Cistercian foundation in County Tipperary, was a significant centre of medieval religious life in Ireland, and its fabric contains layers of use and reuse stretching across several centuries. A recumbent slab, as the type is known, is a flat memorial stone laid horizontally over or near a burial, often incised with a figure, a cross, or an inscription identifying the deceased. This example dates to the seventeenth century, a period when the abbey's fortunes were considerably reduced from their medieval peak, yet people were still being commemorated within its walls, or at least within its ruins. Who that person was, and what the slab once said, remains unknown.