At the west end of the nave of St Carthage's Cathedral in Lismore, a sixteenth-century chest tomb quietly rewards anyone who stops to look closely. The carved slab is densely populated: a floriate cross with a stepped base occupies the centre, the symbols of the four Evangelists appear at the corners, and two shields carry the heart of the Virgin and the Symbols of the Passion. The main scene depicts Christ in the tomb alongside St Gregory celebrating Mass, an unusual pairing that points to late medieval preoccupations with intercession and the real presence in the Eucharist. Around the sides of the tomb surround, the twelve apostles line the long faces, a crucifixion fills one short end, and the other presents St Catherine flanked by St Patrick and St Carthage, the latter being the sixth-century founder closely associated with Lismore itself.

The tomb belongs to John McCreagh and his wife Katherine, daughter of Thomas Prendergast, and carries the date 1557. An inscription also records that Donal McCreagh was buried in the same tomb in 1548, suggesting the monument was prepared or at least dedicated over several years. John McCreagh held the position of constable of Mocollop Castle, a fortification roughly eleven kilometres to the west along the Blackwater river, which gives some sense of the family's standing in the region. Katherine's family, the Prendergasts, may have had connections with Newcastle, a few kilometres further west again. The tomb has attracted scholarly attention since the late nineteenth century, with detailed treatments by Buckley in 1898, Garstin in 1904, and Hunt in his 1974 survey of Irish medieval figure sculpture, the last of which places the McCreagh monument within a broader tradition of elaborate ecclesiastical carving that flourished in Ireland between 1200 and 1600.