That act of deliberate clearance, practical and perhaps not entirely respectful of the dead, is what eventually brought one of those slabs back into the light. During drainage excavations along the River Nore in Kilkenny, carried out between 2001 and 2003, thirteen graveslabs were recovered from the riverbed in the vicinity of John's Bridge. They had been used as rubble to reinforce the protective apron around the piers of a late medieval bridge that once stood just to the north of the current crossing.

One slab in particular repays close attention. A tapering limestone marker, 1.62 metres long and broken into six pieces, it was found lying beneath the remains of one of the bridge piers. The top of the slab is missing, but most of the cross-head survives, decorated in raised relief with an eight-armed cross whose terminals were fashioned in fleur-de-lis style, the shaft ending in a three-armed floriated cross beneath a barred knop, a small rounded projection used as a decorative stop. The cross itself has been deliberately defaced, leaving only a rough outline where the carving once stood proud. Along the right-hand edge of the upper face, two lines of Lombardic lettering, a bold, rounded script common on medieval funerary monuments, carry a Latin inscription: HIC JACET EMMA VXOR THOME DE WAWIL ORATE PRO ANIMA EIUS, which translates as "Here lies Emma wife of Thomas De Wawil, pray for their souls." The slab has been dated to the fourteenth century. The graveslabs are thought to have been cleared from a cemetery attached to either St Mary's parish church, about 100 metres to the west of the find site, or St John's Priory, roughly 200 metres to the northeast. The slabs are now kept at Magdalen Tower on Maudlin Street in Kilkenny, a surviving fragment of a medieval priory and one of the few remaining traces of the same ecclesiastical landscape that Emma De Wawil once inhabited.