It is a portion of a chest tomb panel, a type of raised rectangular tomb common in late medieval Ireland, and it measures less than a metre in length. What makes it worth pausing over is the carving itself: low-relief passion symbols, including a pierced heart and a seamless robe, cut into fossiliferous limestone, a stone dense with the compressed remains of ancient marine creatures. The fragment is older than its surroundings by roughly two centuries, an object repurposed or simply preserved within a space built long after it was made.

The panel dates to the 16th century and is now housed within what is known as the Bryan Vault, a mausoleum constructed in the 18th century as part of the St Mary's complex. The passion symbols it bears belong to a well-established iconographic tradition in medieval Christian funerary art, in which the instruments and emblems of Christ's suffering, including the pierced heart and the garment cast for by lot at the crucifixion, were used to express devotion and intercession for the dead. Carved in low relief, meaning the imagery is raised only slightly from the surface rather than cut deeply, the imagery would have been part of a larger composition across the full panel of a chest tomb. What survives is a fragment, and what the rest once showed is no longer known.