The piece, carved from Dundry stone, a fine-grained oolitic limestone quarried near Bristol and widely exported to Ireland and Britain during the medieval period, measures less than thirty centimetres on either side. It shows a flat pilaster flanked by the columns of two decorative niches, the kind of delicate architectural detail that would once have formed part of a free-standing chest tomb. A chest tomb, in this context, is a box-shaped monument raised on a base, with carved panels on all sides, designed to stand independently within a church or chapel rather than sit flush against a wall.

The fragment came originally from Athassel Abbey in County Tipperary, one of the largest Augustinian priories ever built in Ireland. It is one of five pieces from the same tomb currently held in the Kilkenny depot, some of them glued together from smaller broken sections. Scholars John Hunt and Conleth Manning both dated the tomb to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, placing its creation during a period when Athassel was among the wealthiest and most influential religious houses in Munster. The tomb was not entirely lost to view; one side panel survived in better condition and is now on display in the Vicars Choral at the Rock of Cashel, just a few kilometres from Athassel. That surviving panel, read alongside the depot fragments, confirms that the original structure was free-standing, which tells us something about how it was conceived and positioned within the abbey church. The Dundry stone itself is a detail worth pausing on: its presence indicates that whoever commissioned this tomb had access to imported materials and the means to pay for them, a marker of considerable status in any medieval Irish context.