The lower portion of the figure, a bishop in full vestments with his right hand raised in blessing and his left holding a crozier, gives the impression of having been quickly sketched in preparation for a carving that never quite arrived. The feet and legs are shown in rough profile, in contrast to the almost metallic precision of the hands and head above. It is a strange quality in a funerary monument, and one that makes this effigy worth looking at carefully.

The slab was discovered shortly before 1890, set in low relief beneath an architectural canopy whose projecting elements are now largely destroyed. The bishop wears a mitre of what scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, identified as a distinctly Irish form, one associated with the west of Ireland and with territories outside English political control in the medieval period. The mitre terminates in a trefoil ornament and has parallels with the figure on the east face of the Doorty cross at Kilfenora, also in Clare, and with a later slab from Faughart in County Louth. The crozier is of Romanesque type, with a spherical knop and simple volute. Hunt also noted the relationship between this effigy's canopy, decorated with large stalked berries at the cusps, and two effigies at Ardfert Cathedral in County Kerry, suggesting a shared artistic tradition across the western seaboard. The date of the work is uncertain, though Hunt placed it probably in the thirteenth century. What makes the carving particularly unusual is its technique: the artist appears to have worked from a strongly linear tradition, beginning with careful, almost graphic precision at the head and hands, before the treatment loosens and softens towards the vestments and lower body. Whether the unfinished lower section reflects an interruption, a change of plan, or simply a sculptor working at the limits of the available stone is not known.