Broken clean across in two places and heavily weathered, it measures just under a metre in length, tapering from roughly 43 centimetres at its broader end to 23 centimetres at the top, and only 7 centimetres deep. What survives of its surface carries an inscription in English, though most of it has been swallowed by time and damage.

The scholar Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the early 1890s, managed to read enough of the lettering to reconstruct the essential information: the slab once identified itself as the resting place of one Donough Macnamara of a placename that is now only partially legible, a man recorded as having died in 1654. The name Macnamara points to one of the prominent Gaelic families of County Clare, a sept long associated with the region around Quin. The date places his death in the turbulent mid-seventeenth century, shortly after the upheavals of the 1641 rebellion and the Cromwellian campaigns that followed. Quin Abbey itself, a Franciscan friary founded in the fifteenth century on the remains of an earlier Anglo-Norman castle, had by then been suppressed for over a century, though it continued to serve as a burial ground for local families long after its friars had gone. That a graveslab here carries an English rather than Latin inscription is itself a small detail worth noticing, reflecting the linguistic shifts taking place in formal commemoration even within Gaelic-affiliated families during that period.

Today the slab is recumbent and unprotected on the abbey floor. Visitors should look carefully near the crossing tower, the square tower that marks the junction of nave and chancel, where the slab lies flat and unremarked. Given its condition, only a fragment of the original lettering remains visible to the naked eye, and what Westropp was able to read in the nineteenth century is likely more than can be made out today.