The slab, two metres long and tapering along its visible edge, was once a funerary monument, carved to mark a grave. By the sixteenth or seventeenth century, whoever was then making use of the ruined priory as a farmstead had no great ceremony about such things, and the stone was laid down as the lower step in a doorway to the west room of the south claustral range, the covered walkway that once bordered the cloister garden. Its upper surface is heavily worn, probably re-tooled at some point, and the hollow bevel cut along its long edge suggests it was deliberately shaped to fit its new, more mundane function. The upper end remains hidden from view, built into the structure.

Kells Priory was founded for Augustinian canons, a religious order whose members lived under the Rule of Saint Augustine and combined monastic life with pastoral work in the wider community. The priory became one of the more substantial ecclesiastical complexes in medieval Kilkenny, and when it fell out of religious use following the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, the buildings were adapted for secular occupation. This particular graveslab is one of a large collection of medieval funerary monuments identified at the site, all of them catalogued and described by the scholar J. Higgins. Stylistically, the slab dates to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, placing its original carving well within the active life of the priory. The decision to reuse it as a step belongs to a later, less reverent phase of the site's history, when practicality took precedence over whatever memory the stone once carried.