The effigy lying on top commemorates Pierce fitz Oge Butler, who died on the feast of St Benedict, Abbot, in 1526, and the Latin inscription carved around him asks that God have mercy on his soul and invites a Pater Noster and Ave Maria from any who pass. But the tomb as it now stands is not quite the object it was intended to be. The two panels forming its sides do not appear to be their original arrangement, and the mensa, the flat table-top slab, sits into the front panel rather than projecting over it in the conventional manner, suggesting the whole structure has been assembled, or reassembled, with some improvisation.

The craftsmanship, wherever the pieces originally belonged, is distinctly recognisable. The long front panel carries seven apostles, each standing within an ogee-headed niche, a pointed arch with a gentle S-curved profile, with leaf-forms filling the spandrels and the name of each apostle lettered above, separated by a small stylised flower. The sequence, Peter, Andrew, James the Major, John, Thomas, James the Minor, and Philip, matches exactly the apostle order found on other tomb-chests attributed to the O'Tunney workshop, a family of Kilkenny sculptors whose output shaped much of the funerary stonework in Leinster and Tipperary during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A smaller end panel carries three further apostles, Bartholomew, Simon, and Matthew, with leaf-forms that differ slightly from those on the longer piece, and no flowers between the names. On the top edge of this smaller panel, a craftsman left his own mark in Latin: RORICUS OTUYNE SCRIPSI, meaning "I, Rory O'Tunney, carved this inscription." The scholar Rae, writing in 1971, suspected this panel was an afterthought, added either during or shortly after the completion of the main work, and speculated that the enlarged mensa may have been intended to hold a portable altar for the saying of Masses for the dead. Complicating matters further, the structure incorporates fragments from at least two other tombs, one lying directly beneath the effigy of Pierce, and another worked into the plinth below the figures of the saints, making this a composite object whose full original form remains uncertain. A second Latin inscription on the top of the front panel names a James fitz Butler and records his death, but the date was never cut into the stone.