Recovered from the bed of the River Nore during drainage excavations carried out between 2001 and 2003, it is one of thirteen graveslabs retrieved in the same operation, all of them found clustered around the remains of a late medieval bridge just north of the present John's Bridge in Kilkenny city.

The slab itself is a fragment of what was once a tapering limestone graveslab with bevelled edges, now missing both its top and its bottom. What survives measures roughly 0.7 metres long, 0.45 metres wide, and 0.23 metres thick. A cross carved in relief once decorated the upper face, centred and four-armed, but the surface has been so thoroughly worn by water that only its rough outline remains, and the form of the terminals can no longer be made out. Stylistically it belongs to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. How it ended up in a river is the more unsettling part of the story. Archaeologists working the site proposed that these graveslabs had been deliberately cleared from a nearby graveyard, most likely one associated with either St Mary's parish church, roughly 100 metres to the west, or St John's Priory, about 200 metres to the north-east, and then repurposed as rubble to form a protective apron around the bridge piers. In other words, someone in the late medieval period broke up a graveyard to shore up a river crossing. The slabs were not lost; they were used.

The fragment is now kept in Magdalen Tower on Maudlin Street in Kilkenny, a surviving element of a medieval leper hospital complex, which gives it a second layer of unexpected context. A carved grave marker, stripped from its original resting place, dredged from a river seven centuries later, and housed in a tower that itself once stood at the margins of the medieval city.