What makes it quietly arresting is not its condition but what survives despite it: a finely incised cross at the centre, and beside it the remnants of an inscription that has held its partial secret for the best part of seven centuries.

The inscription is in Lombardic lettering, a rounded, decorative script common in medieval stonework from roughly the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and its presence here helps date the slab to that period. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan transcribed what could still be read: RIKAR.....CHIRCB....SA AL....T MERC, which he expanded as "Rikard [de] Chircb...[lies here.] On his soul may God have mercy." The gaps in the text represent letters lost to damage or wear, and the surname remains incomplete, though Carrigan rendered it as Chircb with some confidence in its opening letters. The formula itself, a request for divine mercy on the soul of the named individual, was entirely conventional for funerary inscriptions of the era, but the personal name Rikard, a Hiberno-Norman form of Richard, is a small reminder that the medieval church in Kilkenny served a community shaped heavily by Norman settlement. Whoever this Rikard was, he was significant enough to warrant a carved floor slab within the chancel, the most prestigious burial space in any medieval church, reserved for clergy, patrons, and persons of standing.