The monument consists of two main elements: a recumbent rectangular slab, over two metres long, carved in relief with a seven-armed segmental cross, each arm terminating in a fleur-de-lis, and a front panel divided into three niches. The cross rests on an elaborate pillar-base, and an interlocked pair of rectangular forms occupies the central portion of the slab. Running along the top, down one side, and across the base is an inscription in Black Letter script, the Gothic lettering style common to late medieval funerary stonework.

The inscription, partially damaged and difficult to read even in earlier centuries, was transcribed by Fitzgerald in 1903 and supplemented by Maher in 1997. It reads, in translation, as: "Here lies Master Jeremy Ryan, formerly official of Cashel, and his good wife" followed by a fragmentary phrase suggesting she was a woman of good repute, possibly his widow, with a death date of the 7th of June. Ryan's title "official of Cashel" indicates he held a judicial role within the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a position with real administrative and legal weight. The front panel presents a crucifixion scene in the central and largest niche, with Our Lady standing to Christ's right, hands clasped and wearing a mantle, and St John on the left, his arm raised to his face in a stylised gesture of grief. In ogee-headed niches at either end, pointed arches with curved and recurved profiles characteristic of late medieval decorative carving, stand a mitred archbishop and St Peter carrying the keys of heaven. The scholar John Hunt suggested in 1974 that the archbishop is more likely St Thomas of Canterbury, noting that Thomas and Peter appear together frequently in this tradition. Hunt also attributed both the slab and the front panel to the O'Tunney workshop, a family of Kilkenny sculptors whose output shaped ecclesiastical stone carving across Munster and Leinster in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He pointed to distinctive letterforms, particularly the H of HIC and the J of JACET, as characteristic of their hand, and concluded that the two pieces, despite their separate positions, almost certainly originated as a single commission.