The exact day of Richard Shortall's death is missing from the inscription, worn or damaged beyond recovery, leaving only the month and year: March 1584. His wife, Ellis Purcell, got her full date. She died on the 23rd of December 1562, more than two decades before her husband, and the two of them share a single slab that someone, at some point after 1584, arranged to mark them both.

The slab itself carries a raised eight-pointed cross running down its centre, with a border inscription in raised Black Letter, the angular Gothic script commonly used in formal stone carving and manuscript work of the period. The Latin text, recorded by the historian William Carrigan in his 1905 history of the Diocese of Ossory, names Richard Shortall as lord of Rathardmore, a territorial designation that places him among the Hiberno-Norman landed families who had deep roots in Kilkenny by the sixteenth century. The Shortalls and the Purcells were both established names in the region, and the pairing of the two surnames on one slab reflects the kind of dynastic alliance that shaped landholding and local power across medieval Leinster. There is a second graveslab of the same period in the same chancel, suggesting that St. Martin's served as a place of burial for families of some local standing.