The lower portion of a rectangular stone, measuring roughly one and a half metres in length and just five centimetres thick, it carries a crack across its face and is missing whatever once occupied its upper section. What remains, though, is quietly legible: a carved cross-shaft with a single cross-band rising from a stepped base, and along the sides and base, a Latin inscription cut in Black Letter script, the angular, compressed letterforms typical of late medieval stone carving across western Europe.

The inscription was transcribed by FitzGerald in the early twentieth century and reads, in part, HIC IACET JACOBUS BOITON CIVIS CIVITATIS CAS, before the text breaks off where the slab has been lost. What follows names the year as 1513 or 1514, and then identifies a second figure: David Boyton, son of the deceased, who commissioned the monument. The full translation, as given by Maher in 1997, runs: "Here lies James Boyton citizen of Cashel, died 1513 [1514], and David Boyton his son who caused this monument to be erected." The designation of James as a citizen of Cashel rather than a cleric or noble places him among the town's lay community, a relatively unusual emphasis on civic identity for a memorial of this period. The Boyton name does not otherwise loom large in the familiar histories of the Rock, which makes this fragment something of a small, accidental biography, preserved largely because stone is difficult to discard entirely.