What can still be made out is enough to name the dead: Joannes O'Meara, an ecclesiastic commemorated in the late fifteenth century with the kind of effigial tomb, a slab carved with a likeness of the deceased, that was a mark of some local significance. The slab measures just over a metre in length and is only seventeen centimetres thick, modest in scale, but its survival in any readable form is something of a minor wonder given its exposed position and the general state of the ruins around it.

The priory itself was dedicated to St Mary and founded sometime after 1140, according to ecclesiastical historians Gwynn and Hadcock. It belonged to the Augustinian order and may have been established on the site of an earlier monastic centre associated with a St Donain, though the evidence for that earlier foundation is uncertain. By the time the O'Meara slab was carved, the priory had been standing for the better part of three centuries, and what remains today is poorly preserved, a scattering of stonework on a slight rise in the middle of the village. The tomb slab itself sits outside the south wall at the eastern end of the priory, though an earlier description by the scholar Gleeson placed it outside the north wall, a small discrepancy that hints at just how fluid the physical condition of the site has been over the decades of observation and record.

The inscription, once rendered in raised lettering, has been partly erased by weathering, but the name O'Meara is still legible. The O'Mearas were a Tipperary sept with a long association with the region around Toomevara and Ormond, which makes this fragment of carved stone something more than an isolated curiosity; it anchors a named individual to a specific religious community at a very particular moment in late medieval Irish life.