Dredged from the River Nore between 2001 and 2003 during drainage works, the slabs had apparently been stripped from a graveyard, possibly attached to St Mary's parish church about a hundred metres to the west, or to St John's Priory roughly two hundred metres to the north-east, and repurposed as rubble to reinforce the protective apron around the piers of a late medieval bridge. The dead, in other words, were put to structural use.

One fragment in particular repays close attention. A piece of limestone graveslab, cut down and reused as a building stone, still carries the ghost of its original purpose: a portion of an incised cross, its circular centre intact, with the sinister and lower arm of a four-armed cross surviving, each arm terminating in a fleur-de-lis, the whole enclosed within a double-lined circle. A circular knop, a small decorative boss, sits on the cross-shaft just below the cross-head. The mortar still clinging to its surface is a reminder of its second life as anonymous building material. The style places it in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when such decorated graveslabs, usually cut from local limestone, were a common form of commemoration for clergy and laypeople of some standing. The slabs are now kept in Magdalen Tower on Maudlin Street, Kilkenny, a surviving medieval structure that at least offers them more dignity than a riverbed.