The upper portion that survives is only about half a metre across, yet it carries, in careful high relief, the carved head of a man: pointed face, almond-shaped eyes, a straight mouth, and a short-cropped hairstyle cut level with the ears. He wears a cap marked with four vertical lines running down its centre. Around him, the dressed stone is cut into a deep quatrefoil recess, a four-lobed decorative frame of the kind associated with high-status commemorative work. An incised inscription in Lombardic script, the rounded, ornamental lettering favoured by medieval masons, opens with a cross pattée and the words HIC JACET W, meaning "Here lies W", before the slab breaks off. Whatever name began with that letter is gone.

The slab belongs to a type known as a head-slab, in which the deceased is represented by a portrait relief rather than a full-length effigy. It was recovered from Kells Priory, a substantial Augustinian house in County Kilkenny, as part of a large group of medieval graveslabs found there during archaeological excavation. Stylistically, the carving dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a period when carved memorial slabs of this quality were being commissioned for ecclesiastical communities and their patrons across Ireland. At some later point, probably in the late medieval or post-medieval period, the slab was broken and repurposed as a liner within a grave in the priory church nave, turned from a monument into building material. The identity of the man with the cap and the almond eyes was, at that point, apparently no longer the concern of whoever was digging.