The monument is polished limestone, rectangular, and considerable in scale, measuring just under two metres wide. Its upper section carries an inverted shield pediment bearing impaled arms, a heraldic term for two coats of arms placed side by side on a single shield to represent a marriage alliance, in this case the Kealy arms on the left and the Hackett arms on the right.

The inscription names Peirs Keally, described as a burgess, meaning a full citizen or freeman, of the town of Gowran, who died on the first of January 1648. Beside his name is that of his wife Alson, daughter of Nicholas Hackett, gentleman, though the date of her death was left incomplete, the day, month, and final digits of the year all blank, as if whoever commissioned the stone either did not yet know when she would die or simply never returned to finish it. Below the main inscription, cut in a softer, mixed-case script rather than the formal capitals above, are four lines of verse: "Rest together the wish of man and wife: To rest intomb'd resembeling theire past life. Though death subscribed to theire divorce: Theire remnants wall'd are from divisions force." The arms appear again on either side of the semi-circular head of the central recess, the Kealy shield showing a wavy chevron with three cantons, the Hackett shield bearing three hakes, a type of fish, a visual pun common in heraldry. One of the projecting piers that framed the central recess is now missing, as is part of the entablature above it, but the monument remains largely legible.

A comparable wall monument attributed to the same tradition survives inside the church itself, at the east end of the north aisle of the nave, suggesting that Gowran's medieval parish church once held a modest concentration of high-quality Renaissance funerary sculpture. The thirteenth-century fabric of St Mary's and its later additions are accessible to visitors, and the mortuary chapel where this monument stands is attached externally to the south wall of the nave.