There is no name on it, no date, no clue as to whose memory it was made to keep. What it does have, filling nearly every inch of its surface, is an elaborate programme of decoration divided into four panels within an incised groove frame: three dense fields of foliage work and a fourth containing six animals arranged in three opposing pairs, each one a lion passant, the heraldic pose in which a lion walks with one paw raised. A narrow plain band separates all of this from the finely moulded edges of the slab, giving the whole composition a controlled, almost architectural quality.

The carving is thought to date from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, placing it in a period when elaborate funerary stonework was produced at a high level of craft across Connacht, often under the patronage of Gaelic lordly families or the religious houses associated with them. The church at Rathfran was a Dominican friary, and the quality of the work here, the precision of the foliage, the confident handling of the heraldic animals, suggests it was made for someone of considerable standing. Whoever that person was, the slab carries no inscription to say. The lions face one another in silence, and blotches of lichen have crept across parts of the surface, softening some of the detail that the medieval carver took such care to set down.