The stone is fragmented, roughly 1.18 metres tall and 60 centimetres wide, and the face turned towards the wall is said to bear a cross along with a further year and date, leaving half the memorial effectively hidden from view. That combination of partial concealment, damaged condition, and displaced setting gives the slab an oddly marginal presence for what was clearly a monument to a man of some standing.

The inscription names David Roche, described as an esquire and counsellor at law, who died on the 13th of August 1686, and his daughter Mary, who had died the previous year, in 1685. The Roche family were among the old Catholic legal and merchant families of Munster, and the choice of a Dominican burial ground would have been consistent with that background. The slab almost certainly originated in the medieval Dominican friary that once stood in Tralee, a foundation dating to the thirteenth century that was suppressed during the Reformation. When the modern Dominican church was eventually established on a new site, stones from the earlier friary appear to have followed, whether deliberately preserved or simply carried along in the movement of materials. The slab's current position, mortared into a garden wall rather than lying flat as a floor or grave marker, suggests it was re-set at some point after its original use, and the record of its earlier location acknowledges that this is no longer where it began.