The slab was commissioned by a man named Edmond Brine and his wife Johanny to commemorate his parents, Dermot Brine and More Cullon, who died in 1624. The monument itself was completed in 1635, the date carved into the stone alongside a final name, Patrich Brine, perhaps another family member added to the memorial in the intervening years. What makes the inscription quietly affecting is its closing appeal, chiselled in Roman capitals across the lower portion of the slab: "for as you are soe have they been, and as they are you shall be." It is the standard memento mori formula, but seeing it spelled out in seventeenth-century English on a fractured piece of limestone gives it an unguarded directness.

The slab originally lay in the chancel of the medieval church at Moone, Co. Kildare, a site associated with an early monastic foundation and better known today for its remarkable high cross. By the 1880s the slab had already broken and was found lying in pieces on the north side of the ruined abbey. In the early 1890s the fragments were drilled, fastened together, and set in cement on a masonry base, a common Victorian approach to stabilising vulnerable stonework. By 1986, when researchers examined it again, the slab had broken further into three pieces, two of which are now held in Kilkenny. Together those two surviving fragments measure just over 1.6 metres in length and 0.65 metres wide. The carved decoration below the inscription is dense with symbolism: a cross on a calvary mount bearing the IHS monogram, its arms terminating in fleur-de-lys, flanked by a sun and crescent moon within double-ringed circles. On the lower right side of the slab are a skull and crossed bones with what appears to be a robe or purse beneath them; on the lower left, the sword of Saint Peter and three dice, a reference to the soldiers who cast lots for Christ's garments at the crucifixion. Much of this carving is heavily worn, and some details, particularly the celestial symbols, are only faintly legible.