The recumbent slab at its centre, measuring roughly 1.8 metres long, has been badly damaged, and the Latin inscription carved in Roman capitals on the rectangular plaque behind it is so badly eroded that only a fragment remains legible, translating as 'Feed my sheep', a phrase drawn from the Gospel of John. What makes this more than ordinary weathering is the historical record attached to the damage: the monument was, according to an eighteenth-century account, 'defaced by a chisel in the reign of King James II by some ignorant Papist'. The contemptuous phrasing belongs to a particular Protestant historiographical tradition, but the physical evidence of deliberate chiselling is harder to dismiss.

The monument commemorates Archbishop Hamilton, who held the archbishopric from 1623 to 1629, during a period of considerable religious and political tension in Ireland. The structure itself is a layered and ambitious piece of funerary architecture. A round-headed tomb recess, the kind of arched niche commonly used to frame effigies or recumbent slabs in post-Reformation ecclesiastical monuments, is framed by side pilasters with moulded imposts that continue as a string-course around the rear of the recess. Above the entablature, a heraldic achievement, meaning a formal display of a coat of arms with its accompanying decorative elements, is flanked by debased Ionic pilasters and an ovolo scroll, all resting on a plain rectangular plinth. The composition is crowned by a semicircular open-fan device and, above that, an obelisk, a motif associated with remembrance and eternity that became fashionable in early seventeenth-century funerary design. It is a monument assembled with real architectural ambition, which makes the subsequent attack on it all the more pointed.