Look more carefully, though, and the surface resolves into something precise and deliberate: a seven-armed segmental-headed cross carved in relief, its terminals ending in fleur-de-lis, a three-barred knop sitting beneath the cross-head, and a banded shaft running down toward the base. Around the top and along the left-hand edge, a narrow border carries a Latin inscription in raised Black Letter script, the formal Gothic lettering favoured for serious documents and memorial stones throughout the medieval period and well into the sixteenth century.

The inscription was transcribed by the historian William Carrigan in 1905 and reads: "Hic jacet Elisia Blancheuld filia q obit vi die mensis Desember 1581", meaning "Here lies Ellis, daughter of Leonard Blanchville, who died, Dec. 6th, 1581." The name connects the slab directly to the Blanchville family, who gave the townland of Blanchvillestown its name, and who were prominent in this part of Kilkenny for several centuries. The slab itself measures 1.5 metres in length and 0.52 metres in width, substantial enough to have required real effort in the carving, suggesting a family with both resources and a desire to mark the death of Ellis with some permanence. She died in early December 1581, and whoever commissioned the stone chose a design that was already somewhat old-fashioned by that date, rooted in late medieval funerary conventions rather than the newer Renaissance styles beginning to appear on Irish monuments of the period.