Cut in black letter script and rendered in false relief, a technique where letters are made to appear raised by cutting away the surrounding stone rather than carving the letters themselves in relief, it bears a Latin date formula that reads 'ANNO DOi MCCCCIIIVI', corresponding to 1436. So far, so straightforward. But hovering above that date, in unusually large lettering and with no obvious connection to anything below it, is a row of five zeros.

The slab was originally fixed to the north wall of the nave at Athassel Abbey, a large Augustinian priory on the River Suir in County Tipperary, founded in the late twelfth century and one of the most extensive monastic ruins in Ireland. At some point it was removed from the wall and is now stored on-site. The five superscript zeros are the real puzzle. According to a suggestion made by Gerard Crotty, the correct Latin convention for dates of this kind would place a zero after each numeral in the sequence, essentially as separators. If the carver was unfamiliar with that convention, he may have gathered all the zeros together in a single continuous row above the date rather than distributing them correctly. And he appears to have miscounted: the convention would require four zeros, one after each element, but the slab carries five. What emerges is a portrait of someone working at the edge of their Latin literacy, following a formula they had perhaps seen but not fully understood, and making a small arithmetical slip in the process.

The slab is no longer in its original position on the nave wall, so a visitor to Athassel would need to ask about its current storage location on-site. The abbey ruins themselves are freely accessible and extensive, and the nave where the stone once hung remains largely legible despite centuries of exposure.