Measuring just over two metres in length, it is otherwise unadorned, save for capital letters incised around the entire edge of the stone spelling out: HERE LYETH THE BODY OF HYGATELONE WHO LIVED 21 YEARES DEANE OF THIS CHURCH AND DIED IN SEPTEMBER 1638. The name Hygatelone does not appear in any well-known record of Irish ecclesiastical figures, and the spelling, while clearly a product of its era, gives no obvious clue to the bearer's origins. At the western end of the slab there are faint traces of decorative carving, though these are too worn now to read with any confidence.

Kilfenora Cathedral, a Romanesque structure founded in the twelfth century and associated with a diocese so small that the Pope himself is sometimes said to hold the bishopric in absentia, has long been a site layered with accumulated burial material. The chancel, where this slab lies recumbent in the north-east corner, contains several other rough slabs, some of which may also be medieval in date, and a second identified medieval graveslab lies nearby to the south-west. The 1638 slab was noted by Barry in 1892 but was not included in later monument surveys from 1992 or 1996, an omission that leaves it in a curious administrative limbo, present in plain sight yet officially unregistered for much of the twentieth century. That a man described as having served twenty-one years as dean of the church should be commemorated by a stone so austere, and one whose very name has since become obscure, gives the inscription a quiet, slightly melancholy weight.