The tomb was first noticed when that heating infrastructure was installed around 1865, then lost again beneath the floor, and only properly uncovered during excavations in 2015. Its cover has been missing since at least that first nineteenth-century exposure, and no one knows where it went.

The tomb commemorates Walter Archer, son of John, described in the Latin inscription as a burgess of Kilkenny, and his wife Johanna Hacket. Johanna died on the sixteenth of September 1565; Walter followed on the first of December 1575. The inscription runs along the west side panel in false relief Latin blackletter, a lettering style that gives the appearance of depth without being fully carved through, and closes with the conventional appeal, "on whose souls may the Lord have mercy, Amen." One small detail in the lettering repays attention: both instances of the letter A, in "A.D." and in "Archer", were formed using the Archer family's merchant mark, an arrow. The practice of embedding a personal or trade mark into a monumental inscription was not unusual among merchant families of the period, but it gives this particular text an almost heraldic quality. Three of the four side panels are entirely plain. The tomb itself is carved from fossiliferous limestone, a locally abundant stone flecked with the remains of ancient marine organisms, and measures just under two metres in length. Probing during the 2015 excavations revealed that it sits above a slab-lined grave containing a coffin burial. Its position, freestanding at the centre of the south side of the south transept, suggests it may have served a dual purpose as an altar within the Archer chantry chapel, a private chapel endowed by a family for the saying of masses on behalf of their souls.

The tomb is visible in situ beneath its glass floor panel, which allows visitors to see both the scale of the monument and the inscription on its surviving side panel without disturbing the ground around it.