It is an effigial tomb lid, a carved memorial in flat relief showing a noblewoman in full detail: long robes, a crown-like pill-box headdress with a chin-covering barbe and two circular bosses that may have been hair-nets, a mantle cord held at the breast with the left hand, a head resting on a double rectangular cushion, and a small dragonesque creature pressed beneath her feet. The right-hand edge of the slab is neatly finished with a double fillet roll-moulding; the left is roughly dressed, as though that side was always intended to face a wall.

The church itself was built on the chancel of the medieval church of St Mary's, which dates to the thirteenth century, and the slab has remained in this corner of that sacred geography ever since. Writing in 1974, the art historian John Hunt identified the figure as possibly Eleanor de Bohun, niece of King Edward II, and dated the carving to somewhere between 1338 and 1344. His reasoning rested partly on Eleanor's marriage to James Butler, whose own possible effigy also survives within the same church, suggesting the two monuments may have been commissioned together. After James Butler's death, Eleanor remarried and eventually died at Shere in England in 1363. Hunt allowed for a second candidate: Joan, wife of Edmund, the first Earl of Carrick, which would push the date back to around 1320, though he considered this the less probable reading.

The slab has suffered some damage at the base, across the feet of the figure, but this has been repaired. Visitors to the church in Gowran who look carefully at the east wall will find both the female effigy and the nearby Butler monument sharing the same modest space, two medieval stone figures who may once have lain side by side and whose identities, after nearly seven centuries, remain a matter of informed conjecture.