What survives is the lid alone, just over two metres in length, and yet it carries enough detail to make clear that the people who commissioned it wanted something done properly. The cross carved into its surface is a seven-armed interlace design with fleur-de-lys terminals, the kind of decorative flourish associated with late medieval and early modern Hiberno-Norman stonework, and the inscription running along its borders and up the shaft is cut in raised Roman capitals, legible after four centuries.

The tomb commemorates Richard Grace, son of Robert of Adamstown, and his wife Honora Shortall, and is dated to around 1600. The Latin inscription, as recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, reads: RICARDVS GRACE ROB'TI DE ADAMSTOWNE ET ONORA SARTEL EIVS VXOR ME FIERE F[ECERVNT], which translates, with pleasing directness, as "Richard Grace fitz Robert, of Adamstown, and Onner Shortall, his wife, got me made." The phrase "fitz Robert" follows the older Norman naming convention, identifying a son by his father's first name, and the whole composition sits somewhere between the medieval world that produced that convention and the early modern one that supplied the Roman lettering. The Shortalls were a well-established Kilkenny family, and the Graces of Adamstown were a branch of a dynasty with deep roots across the county. This tomb lid is, in a quiet way, a document of how those families understood themselves at the turn of the seventeenth century.