The stone, measuring just over two metres in length, was carved sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, then quietly repurposed in the nineteenth century to commemorate an entirely different family. It is the kind of object that rewards close attention precisely because its surface tells two stories at once.

The original carving is elaborate and confident in its craft. A seven-arm floriated cross dominates the face of the slab, its shaft set on a stylised calvary mount, the stepped base that traditionally represents the hill of Golgotha. At the top and base of the shaft, triple barred knops, ornamental projections typical of late medieval Irish funerary stonework, provide a formal visual rhythm. Running along the upper and lower margins is a Black letter inscription, the Gothic script common to ecclesiastical and memorial work of the period, still legible despite the passage of time and the attentions of a later mason. When the stone was reused in the nineteenth century, new lettering was added to record John Moclair, who died in 1811, and his wife Maria, who died in 1830. The calvary mount is now cracked and broken, and the whole slab lies flat, cemented onto a stone vault.

The church beside which this slab sits occupies roughly the centre of the graveyard, itself positioned on raised ground with undulating pasture on all sides. The reuse of an older graveslab was not uncommon in post-medieval Ireland, particularly where good-quality carved stone was available and the original commemorated party had been forgotten or displaced. What makes the Ballyclerahan example worth seeking out is the visibility of both inscriptions: the medieval Black letter script in its margins and the plainer nineteenth-century addition coexist on the same surface, a physical record of continuity and reinvention in a single piece of stone.