It is a portion of a chest tomb panel, a chest tomb being a box-shaped funerary monument that would originally have enclosed the burial space above ground. What makes this piece arresting is not its size but its density; carved in raised relief across its surface is an elaborate programme of Passion imagery, the symbolic objects associated with Christ's suffering and death, packed into less than two-thirds of a square metre of stone.

The panel, thought to be the dexter end piece of the original tomb front, measures 0.62 metres long and 0.61 metres high. At its right-hand edge a fluted pillar tapers toward the base and is topped by a semi-circular capital with volutes. The decorative scheme at the centre focuses on the five wounds of Christ, meaning the wounds to his hands, feet, and side, here rendered as a heart pierced with swords. Above the heart sits a cock, a reference to Peter's denial, while beneath it is a birch flail. To the sides of the heart appear Peter's sword and a scourge, and on the other side another scourge accompanied by a purse. That purse, alongside the lower border where the thirty pieces of silver are laid out in two horizontal rows, points directly to Judas. The sinister side of the panel has been broken away, so only part of this carefully organised symbolic field survives. Stylistically, the carving is placed in the early seventeenth century, a period when this kind of Arma Christi iconography, the instruments and emblems of the Passion arranged almost heraldically, was still a serious devotional mode in Irish funerary art, even as religious upheaval elsewhere in Europe was stripping such imagery from public monuments.

The panel sits within St Mary's chancel, a church with its own long medieval history in the town. The fragment is displayed rather than built into any structure, which means it can be examined at close range, its individual symbols read one by one across the stone.