It is a piece of a chest tomb, the kind of free-standing rectangular monument common in medieval churches and priories, typically raised on short legs and decorated with carved panels. This particular fragment preserves part of a cusped multi-foil opening set within a square moulded surround, the sort of delicate decorative stonework that once gave such tombs an almost architectural quality, each face articulated with miniature arched and lobed forms.

The fragment, catalogued as KD019 in the Kilkenny depot, appears to have been cut from Dundry stone, a distinctive oolitic limestone quarried near Bristol in England and exported widely to Ireland during the medieval period, valued for its fine grain and relative ease of carving. Its presence here is something of a geographical puzzle. According to research by Manning in 2005, the piece was originally part of a trefoil arch belonging to a chest tomb from Athassel Abbey in County Tipperary, one of the largest and best-preserved Augustinian priories in Ireland. How it travelled from that site to a storage depot across the county boundary is not recorded. Four other fragments from the same tomb are held in the same Kilkenny store, suggesting that at some point the monument was dismantled or disturbed and its components dispersed. The decorated surface has suffered spalling, a term for the flaking or chipping of stone, which has degraded some of the carved detail, though the form of the moulding remains legible.