Carved in low false-relief, a floriated cross with fleur-de-lis terminals runs the length of the slab, and immediately beneath the cross-head sits a heater-shaped shield, the kind of angular, curved form familiar from medieval armorial carving, bearing three chevrons. The problem is that without the original tinctures, the colours that would have distinguished one heraldic device from another, the shield resists firm identification. The stonecutter worked in a medium that stripped heraldry of its most diagnostic feature, leaving the family name tantalizingly out of reach.

Kells Priory was founded for Augustinian canons, a religious order whose members lived under the Rule of St Augustine, and the priory accumulated a large collection of funerary monuments over the medieval period, of which this slab is one of dozens. Dating stylistically to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, it measures 2.22 metres in length and tapers from 0.53 metres at the top to 0.39 metres at the base, with wide bevelled edges and a narrow raised rim. The two families considered most plausible candidates for the shield's ownership are the De Clare family, who held the lordship of Kilkenny during this period, and the L'Ercedeckne family, later anglicised as Archdeacon, who held property in the county. Neither attribution can be confirmed. A further complication is that the slab has lost some of its surface detail over time. When the Reverend James Graves published a description of it in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in the 1860s, he included an illustration based on a drawing by the artist and geologist George Victor Du Noyer, and that image shows leaf motifs springing from the cross-shaft with a clarity that is no longer visible on the stone itself. In the nineteenth century the slab was positioned near the centre of the north wall of the priory church's chancel.