A chest tomb, sometimes called an altar tomb, is a rectangular stone monument raised above ground level, with a flat top slab, or mensa, serving as the visible face of the memorial. What survives here is enough to be legible, and the gap at the beginning only adds to the curiosity: the name of the person commemorated has to be partly inferred, the monument itself physically fractured in a way that mirrors the incompleteness of the historical record.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded the raised Old English inscription as it then stood, noting that the opening was already lost. What remained read, in Latin, that here lie the lord of Tullihanbrog, a gentleman who died on the 5th of September 1597, and Ellen Comerford, his wife, who together commissioned the monument. Carrigan reconstructed the deceased as Oliver Sentleger, lord of Tullihanbrog, drawing on the partial text. The Sentlegers were a prominent Anglo-Norman family in Kilkenny, and the pairing of that name with Comerford, another established local family, points to the kinds of dynastic connections that late sixteenth-century tomb inscriptions were partly designed to advertise. O'Kelly, writing in 1969, added that the tomb is engraved with emblems of the Passion, a common decorative programme for the period, depicting the instruments associated with the crucifixion.

Nearby, in the graveyard close to the entrance, lies a roughly square stone fragment with raised Black Letter script in Latin along one edge. It carries a portion of an eight-armed interlaced cross, probably finished with fleur-de-lys terminals, though these are now heavily worn. At the centre of the cross-head sits a cross patée, a form with arms that widen towards their ends. The style of both the script and the decoration fits the late sixteenth century, raising the possibility that this loose fragment is part of the same broken chest tomb, displaced at some point and left near the gate rather than returned to the interior.