Nearly five metres tall and almost two metres wide, it was carved from fossiliferous limestone, the kind of stone in which the outlines of ancient marine creatures can sometimes be traced with a fingernail. At its very summit, a finial carries a skull and crossbones beneath a chalice rendered in false relief. It is not a subtle monument. The man who commissioned it clearly intended that nobody, including Death itself, should be in any doubt about where things stood.

Nicholas Knaresborough fitz William died in 1619, and the monument, which he had arranged during his own lifetime, commemorates both him and his wife Rose Rothe. The date 1629 appears in the Latin inscription, suggesting the work was completed a decade after his death. The inscription, incised and gilded in gold in a mixture of Roman capitals and a running cursive hand, opens with a dedication to God and describes Nicholas as a man from a senatorial family of the city, who had held the highest civic office, and who was prudent, pious, hospitable, and mindful of both death and immortality. Then, in a passage that departs from the standard commemorative formula, the text turns and addresses Death directly, mocking it: why do you exult in your marble trophy, careless Death, if you return to ash what was already ash before? The monument's four tiers include Corinthian columns with gold-leafed capitals flanking a round-headed arch, an entablature with projecting cornice, a cartouche flanked by obelisks carrying the arms of both Knaresborough and Rothe, and at the base, a small stylised altar above a fan motif painted in green and gold. The Rothe family were among the most prominent merchant dynasties in early modern Kilkenny, which gives some indication of the social world Nicholas Knaresborough was marrying into and, with this monument, very deliberately advertising. Before the church's twentieth-century reorganisation moved it to the north transept, the monument had stood near the west end of the north wall of the chancel, a more prominent liturgical position.