What makes it quietly puzzling is not its fragmentation but its decoration: where most graveslabs of this type carry a cross, this one does not. Instead, a raised central shaft runs the length of the surviving stone, terminating at the wider end in a narrow pointed triangle. Just before the point where the slab breaks off, a raised knop sits on that shaft, with a band projecting outward at a 50-degree angle, travelling to the right-hand edge of the stone and running along it before stopping short of the top. The edges and top carry a very shallow chamfer, a subtle bevelled border only about seven and a half centimetres wide. There is no inscription. Whoever was buried beneath this stone left no name.

The slab originally came from Jerpoint Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in County Kilkenny that functioned as one of the most significant religious houses in medieval Ireland. The Cistercians, a reform movement within Benedictine monasticism, arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century, and Jerpoint became a centre of considerable sculptural activity; its cloister arcade carvings are among the most studied pieces of medieval stonework in the country. Graveslabs, which were flat stone markers laid over burial sites, typically followed a standard formula: a cross at the wider top end, the shaft running downward. This slab departs from that convention entirely, and the projecting band at an angle from the knop has prompted the suggestion that the carving may represent an object connected with a specific craft or trade, a tool, an instrument, or some professional emblem now too ambiguous to name with confidence. The slab measures 1.14 metres in length, though the missing narrower end means the original would have been longer still.