The figure is rendered in flat relief, meaning the carving sits close to the surface rather than projecting outward in the round, giving it a quality that is almost graphic rather than sculptural. One edge of the slab is finished with a neat double fillet roll-moulding, a decorative carved border of parallel ridges; the other is left rough and unfinished, as though the mason never expected that side to be seen.

The church itself is a 19th-century structure, but it was built on the site of the former chancel of the 13th-century church of St Mary's, and the slab belongs to that earlier world. The scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, suggested the effigy may represent James Butler, first Earl of Ormond, who died in 1337 or 1338, though he also raised the possibility that it could depict Edmund, the first Earl of Carrick, who died in 1321. A second slab elsewhere in the same church, Hunt proposed, likely represents Eleanor de Bohun, wife of James Butler. The figure on this slab is dressed in a long gown falling in straight folds to just above the ankles, with medium-wide sleeves through which the sleeves of a kirtle, an undergarment, are visible at the wrists. His left hand rests on his breast, his right lies at his side. His shoes, fastened with buckles and a strap, have a wide opening over the instep. The hair is cut square below the ears, and the head rests on a double rectangular cushion. Beneath his feet, as though pinned there, is an open-mouthed stylised figure described as dragonesque, a detail that appears on a number of medieval tomb effigies and whose meaning remains a matter of interpretation among scholars.