The figure is anonymous, his feet lost to time, but whoever commissioned this tomb wanted the man remembered in precise, almost technical terms, every element of his military dress fixed in stone with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what these things were.

Effigial tombs of this kind, in which the deceased is represented in carved relief on a flat slab or chest tomb, were a way of projecting status and identity across generations, and this one does so with considerable specificity. The knight is shown in the sword-grasping attitude, his left hand gripping the scabbard and his right the hilt, his left leg crossed over the right in the posture common to many medieval military effigies. He wears a hauberk, the long coat of mail that descends to the knee, vented at the front, and over it a surcoat gathered at the waist by a girdle. His head is protected by a coif, a close-fitting mail hood that covers the skull, chin, and neck in a single continuous defence, leaving only the face visible through that characteristic heart-shaped opening. The hands are enclosed in fingered mail gauntlets running continuous with the sleeves. The scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, compared the surcoat's cut unfavourably to related examples at Kilfane, also in Kilkenny, and dated the whole piece on stylistic grounds to the last quarter of the thirteenth century or the early fourteenth. The abbey church in which it rests is itself a Cistercian foundation of considerable age, and the presence of a high-quality military effigy within it speaks to the close relationship between Anglo-Norman knightly patronage and the Cistercian order in medieval Ireland.