It is a small, unsettling detail, the kind that makes a carved figure seem less like a monument and more like something interrupted. In 2022, the tomb suffered further damage when the body of the effigy broke cleanly away from the structure below the head, coming off in a single piece.

The figure was described in detail by the art historian John Hunt in 1974. He recorded a nobleman wearing a long, loose gown falling in many folds to the feet, a girdle with a long pendant, and a mantle caught up in the left hand. The right hand lies across the breast, apparently holding gloves, a gesture associated with high status in medieval iconography. The hair falls in curls below the ears. Hunt dated the effigy to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and suggested it may represent Walter de Burgo, a powerful Anglo-Norman magnate who died in Galway in 1271 and was brought to Athassel for burial. Athassel was an Augustinian priory founded in the late twelfth century and, by the thirteenth century, one of the largest and wealthiest monasteries in Ireland, which would have made it a fitting resting place for a figure of de Burgo's standing. An effigy tomb, in which a sculpted likeness of the deceased is carved in stone and placed above the burial, was a common way for the medieval nobility to assert both piety and lineage.

The abbey ruins sit beside the River Suir, south of Golden in County Tipperary, and are freely accessible. The choir where the effigy stands is roofless but the walls remain largely intact, and the tomb is visible against the south wall. The figure rewards close attention, particularly the folds of the gown and the detail of the hands, even in its current damaged state.