The slab's edges are sharply chamfered, and its face carries the incised lower section of a cross-shaft that ends not in a plain foot but in a fleur-de-lis, with a barred-knop, a small knopped or bead-like terminal, sitting just above it. It is a fragment, in other words, but a considered one, shaped and decorated with a specificity that speaks to whoever commissioned it.

The slab is one of a large collection of medieval graveslabs recovered from Kells Priory in Rathduff, a substantial Augustinian house in County Kilkenny. Augustinian canons followed a communal rule derived from the writings of St Augustine and were a significant presence in medieval Irish ecclesiastical life; Kells Priory, unusually well-preserved in its standing remains, was among their more important foundations. The sheer number of graveslabs found here, catalogued and described in detail by J. Higgins in a 2007 publication on the priory's funerary monuments, suggests a burial ground used by a community over a long period. This particular fragment, catalogued as number 16 in Higgins's study, is dated on stylistic grounds to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The fleur-de-lis motif, a stylised lily form common in medieval decorative carving across Europe, places the piece within a broader visual vocabulary shared by church craftsmen working in stone during that period.