The break runs horizontally across a woman's figure carved in raised relief, just below her elbows, and the join is still visible if you look for it. That crack, and the quiet fact that the slab now sits inside a nineteenth-century church built on the chancel of a medieval predecessor, gives the effigy a slightly displaced quality, as though it has been passed from one era to the next without anyone quite deciding what to do with it.

The figure herself is rendered in considerable detail. She lies with her head resting on a pillow, wearing a heart-shaped head-dress and a pleated gown with a V-neck that falls in folds to her feet. Her poke sleeves, wide at the opening and fitted toward the wrist, reveal tight buttoned cuffs of the kirtle, the close-fitting undergown, beneath. A girdle sits high under the bosom and drops into a long pendant decorated with a repeating 'S' motif and flowers. The scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, noted that the effigy is closely related to that of Margaret Fitzgerald in St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny, with the elaborate reticulated head-dress, a style formed from a net-like arrangement of fabric, being almost identical between the two. He dated the Gowran effigy to the early sixteenth century and proposed that it may represent Sadhbh MacMurrough Kavanagh, wife of James MacEdmond MacRichard Butler, who died in 1487. The 'S' pattern on the girdle pendant, Hunt suggested, might signal a royal English distinction, though he offered this as a possibility rather than a certainty.

The church itself occupies the former chancel of St Mary's, a thirteenth-century foundation, which means the effigy remains, at least loosely, in the building tradition that would have originally housed it. The slab measures just over two metres in length, and its carved surfaces repay close attention once your eyes adjust to the shallow relief and the particular light of the interior.