The inscription, carved into what is called the dexter surface, has been tentatively transcribed as something approaching "VVORISIOIS DOI/A EA", with the opening letters remaining genuinely uncertain. The stone itself is broken across its lower portion, so whatever the inscription once said in full, part of it is simply gone. What survives is a puzzle: a name, perhaps, or a fragment of a memorial formula, worn to near-illegibility and interrupted by damage.

The slab belongs to a substantial collection of funerary monuments recovered from Kells Priory, an Augustinian house whose canons followed the Rule of St Augustine as regular clergy living a communal life under vows. The priory accumulated a remarkable number of these carved slabs, and this particular example, catalogued and described by J. Higgins in a 2007 study of the site's medieval funerary monuments, dates stylistically to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It is a tapering stone, 1.775 metres long and narrowing from 0.56 metres at the top to 0.29 metres at the base, with bevelled edges and a thickness of 0.15 metres. The decoration is carefully composed: an incised four-armed cross-head with fleur-de-lis terminals, the arms of the lily form used here as ornamental finials, and a circular boss marking the junction where the arms meet. Beneath the cross-head, a floral motif springs from either side of the shaft, followed by a barred-knop, a small projecting collar or knob used as a decorative stop. The shaft itself ends in another fleur-de-lis, with a second barred-knop set just above it. Light diagonal tooling covers much of the remaining surface, a finishing technique that gives the stone a faint, almost textile-like texture without obscuring the principal carving.

What makes the slab linger in the mind is the combination of accomplished ornamental work and that stubborn, almost taunting inscription. Someone went to considerable effort to carve a name or dedication along the edge, in a script that was perfectly readable to any literate person of the period, and yet seven centuries of weathering and breakage have reduced it to a sequence of letters that resists confident interpretation. The person commemorated, whoever they were, remains anonymous.