The upper portion measures less than half a metre across, its left edge is gone, and at some point in its history it was cut up and squared off, repurposed as raw stone rather than respected as a memorial. What remains, though, carries enough detail to place it within a remarkably productive tradition of funerary carving at one of medieval Ireland's more substantial monastic complexes.

Kells Priory in County Kilkenny was founded for Augustinian canons, a religious order whose members lived communally under the Rule of St Augustine and served as priests. The priory became an unusually prolific site for carved graveslabs, with dozens of examples recovered there and subsequently described and catalogued by the researcher J. Higgins in 2007. This particular fragment, dating stylistically to the 13th or 14th century, is decorated with an incised lozenge-shaped cross-head, the cross carved in two lines with concave sides and fleur-de-lis terminals, the lily-like ornamental flourishes that appear frequently on medieval stonework of this period. The tip of one fleur-de-lis is missing, as is the lower terminal of the cross. Higgins proposed that this fragment may in fact be the upper portion of a separate surviving slab, of which only the lower section remains, meaning the two pieces, if the identification is correct, have been catalogued independently without either confirming the other conclusively.

The sheer number of graveslabs at Kells Priory, and the care with which they have been studied, gives even a damaged fragment like this one a kind of coherence it might otherwise lack. Worn, broken, and recut, it nonetheless preserves enough of its original ornament to sit recognisably within a corpus of medieval funerary art that spanned generations of monastic burial at a single site.