This is one piece of what was once a tapering graveslab, the kind of flat or slightly raised stone laid over a burial and carved to mark the person beneath. At some point in the late medieval or post-medieval period, somebody lifted this slab, or what remained of it, and put it back into the ground, this time not as a marker but as a grave liner inside the nave of the priory church itself.

The fragment is decorated in false-relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to leave a design standing slightly proud of the surface, giving the impression of three dimensions without deep carving. What survives is a portion of a tapering cross-shaft and an ovoid knop, the rounded terminal or junction element of a cross head. Based on the style of these details, the slab is thought to date to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It is one of a large collection of graveslabs recovered from Kells Priory, an Augustinian house with a particularly rich archaeological record. The Augustinian canons were a community of clergy who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine and lived in common, and Kells was one of the more substantial priories of their order in Leinster. The full group of slabs from the site was described and catalogued by J. Higgins in a 2007 volume devoted to the priory's medieval funerary monuments, produced alongside the findings of excavations led by T. Fanning and M. Clyne.

What gives this particular fragment its odd quality is precisely its double life. Carved in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to commemorate one person, it was later repurposed to shelter another. The carving that once faced upward, visible to anyone walking through the nave, ended up face-down or embedded in the ground, its imagery of cross-shaft and knop now functioning as structural material rather than memorial. It is a reminder that even stone made for permanence was subject to the pragmatic decisions of later generations.