The piece had been recycled into the mid-18th century east wall of the current chancel, used as ordinary building material, its original purpose long forgotten by whoever laid it there.

The fragment belongs to a chest tomb, specifically what is known as the mensa or ledger, the flat upper slab that caps this type of raised rectangular tomb. It dates to the 16th century and is cut from fossiliferous limestone, a stone that contains the visible remains of ancient marine organisms within its matrix. What makes it remarkable is its carved decoration: an eight-arm cross-head, each arm terminating in a fleur-de-lis, the stylised lily motif common in late medieval ecclesiastical and heraldic carving across Ireland. Whoever commissioned this tomb in the 1500s was investing in a piece of some craftsmanship and symbolic weight. By the 1700s, the slab had been broken up and pressed into service as rubble fill, its identity as a funerary monument entirely dissolved into the fabric of the building.