A limestone graveslab, possibly dating to the fourteenth century, was pulled from the riverbed during drainage excavations carried out between 2001 and 2003, and what it revealed about medieval Kilkenny is quietly unsettling. The slab had not ended up in the water by accident.

Thirteen graveslabs in total were recovered from the Nore during those excavations, all found in association with a late medieval bridge immediately north of the present John's Bridge. The working theory, drawn from the archaeological evidence, is that the slabs were deliberately cleared from a nearby graveyard and used as rubble to reinforce the protective apron around the bridge piers, the shaped stonework designed to deflect river current away from the foundations. The graveyard in question likely belonged to one of two religious sites: St Mary's parish church, roughly a hundred metres to the west, or St John's Priory, about two hundred metres to the northeast. Whoever made that decision, sometime in the medieval period, saw no contradiction in repurposing the markers of the dead as civil engineering material.

This particular slab is broken in two lengthways and missing one end entirely, giving it a total surviving length of 1.83 metres, a width of 0.67 metres, and a thickness of 0.14 metres. Its limestone surface is heavily water-worn and pitted, perforated through at one point, with no surviving decoration or inscription. The rounded double-bevelled edges suggest it may originally have served as the lid of a chest tomb, a free-standing box-like monument common in medieval funerary practice. All identifying marks have been erased by centuries in the river. The slab is now stored in Magdalen Tower on Maudlin Street in Kilkenny, a fifteenth-century tower that itself survives as a fragment of a larger lost complex.