It is a compact, quietly unsettling piece of carving, roughly 60 centimetres tall and 68 centimetres wide, and it is thought to be one side panel of a chest tomb, a free-standing box-shaped monument that would originally have sat above ground in the graveyard, its four carved sides visible to anyone passing.

The panel came to light during a clean-up of the graveyard at Newtown Earley between 1985 and 1987, which turned up a large number of graveslabs altogether. Researcher R. Harte, writing in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987, identified four slabs, including this side panel, a front panel, a second side panel, and a mensa (the flat table-top slab that would have capped the tomb), as possibly belonging to the same chest tomb. The mensa among these bears the signature of a sculptor named Walter Kerin, and Harte noted that the decorative scheme on this side panel, the heart, swords, hands, and feet arranged in that particular X-shaped pattern, was one Kerin favoured. If the attribution holds, the four slabs are the scattered remnants of a single carved monument made by an identifiable hand, which is a rarer circumstance than it might sound for medieval funerary stonework in Ireland.

All four slabs are currently preserved inside the church interior at Newtown Earley, where they were moved after the 1985 to 1987 clearance.