Only a portion of it is now visible, measuring roughly 0.7 metres in length, and the surface is badly worn. What survives of the inscription sits not on the flat upper face but along the chamfered edge, that angled strip running along one side of the slab, carved in black letter script, the angular gothic lettering common to late medieval stonework. The surviving words read simply: "Hic jacet Dominus," which is Latin for "Here lies Lord," and then nothing more.

The full inscription was legible, if already damaged, when the antiquarian O'Donovan examined the slab and transcribed it as "Hic jacet Dominus Matheus Kent quondam Rector de Knoccrafon, A.D. M CCCCC," meaning "Here lies Lord Matthew Kent, formerly rector of Knockgraffon, A.D. 1500." A later transcription by Quinn, published in 1900, gives essentially the same text but suggests the date is more accurately read as 1540. The discrepancy of forty years is not trivial; it places Matthew Kent's death either just before or just after the early stirrings of the Reformation in Ireland, a period when the role of a parish rector in a place like Knockgraffon would have carried quite different implications. Quinn considered his own reading the more reliable of the two. What neither scholar could fully recover was the physical slab itself, which O'Donovan already described as "much mutilated." In the century and more since Quinn's visit, further stone has been lost or buried, leaving only those two opening words still exposed along the chamfer.