But this tapering limestone slab, just over a metre of it surviving, carries on its surface a cross design of some geometric precision: four circles arranged around a central lozenge-shaped open space, the whole enclosed within a larger encircling ring, and below the cross-head a small circular knop, or decorative boss, on the shaft. The incised lines are quiet and deliberate, the work of someone who understood the visual vocabulary of 13th and 14th century funerary carving.

The slab is one of a substantial group found at Kells Priory, a house of Augustinian canons in Co. Kilkenny. The Augustinian canons were communities of priests living under a rule, and Kells was one of the more significant of their Irish foundations. The priory accumulated a considerable collection of decorated graveslabs, many of them now catalogued and described by Jim Higgins in his 2007 study of the medieval funerary monuments excavated there by T. Fanning and M. Clyne. This particular slab, listed as catalogue number 2 in Higgins's work, has a detail that lifts it slightly above the merely fragmentary: it was later recycled. During the late medieval or post-medieval period, someone reused it not as a grave marker in the conventional sense but as a grave liner, set into the nave of the priory church to form part of the physical structure of a burial. A slab made to identify and commemorate the dead became, in effect, building material for another grave entirely.