The setting is quietly incongruous: a pietà, the image of the Virgin cradling the dead Christ, carved in high relief into a slab roughly two-thirds of a metre across, lying not in a church or a formal monument but along the south-western margin of an old burial ground.

A pietà shows the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ after the Crucifixion, and this example is more specific in its composition than the term alone suggests. The Virgin is shown enthroned, with the crucified Christ draped across her knees rather than held in her arms. She grasps the folds of a voluminous veil with her right hand at chest height, while her left hand supports Christ's head. Her robe falls in pleated folds from her knees. Christ wears a loosely draped loincloth; his left arm hangs down and his crooked right arm rests against the Virgin. The letters IHS are carved to one side of her head and MARIA to the other. The Virgin's face is now so weathered that her features are barely legible, which lends the carving a certain blankness that the original sculptor would not have intended. A writer named Mullally, recording the stone in 1862 and 1863, misread the subject entirely, describing it as the Virgin holding the infant Jesus, an understandable error given how worn the surface had already become by that point.

Mullally's account also suggests that in the nineteenth century the slab was kept in the garden of the house nearest the burial ground rather than in its present location, which raises the possibility that the stone has been moved at least once in its lifetime. Whether it was carved for the burial ground, or for a domestic or ecclesiastical setting elsewhere, is not known. The care of the composition and the use of formal iconographic markers like the IHS monogram suggest it was made for devotional use rather than as a purely domestic piece, but the slab's current position in a field ditch, on the crest of a hill in open grassland, tells nothing definitive about its origins.