They did not come to light through excavation in any conventional sense; a graveyard clean-up carried out between 1985 and 1987 brought a large number of them to attention, the kind of patient, unglamorous work that occasionally yields genuinely significant results.

One slab in particular repays close attention. It tapers from 0.73 metres wide at the top to 0.35 metres at the base, and runs to 1.82 metres in length, roughly the span of a tall person. Its edges are chamfered, that is, cut at an angle rather than left square, and its face carries an incised floriated cross, a four-armed cross whose arms terminate in foliate, or leaf-like, forms. At the centre of the cross-head, within a lozenge shape, a smaller cross is cut; the whole cross-head is then encircled by a double-lined ring. A knop, a small decorative knob or boss, sits immediately beneath the cross-head, and the shaft below it ends simply, with a curving line rather than any elaborate foot. R. Harte, writing in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987, placed this slab stylistically in the 13th or 14th century, a period when such floriated cross designs were widely used across medieval Ireland and Britain for marking the graves of people of some local standing, though rarely the very highest nobility, who tended to favour more elaborate effigial slabs.