Measuring only around 85 centimetres in length and tapering from roughly 30 centimetres wide at the top to 25 centimetres at the base, it is a modest, undecorated stone, the kind easily overlooked in a collection dominated by larger, more elaborate medieval funerary monuments. What makes it quietly remarkable is the texture of its upper surface: a carefully executed pattern of pock tooling, small hammered indentations covering the dressed face of the stone. Researcher J. Higgins has suggested this texture was not decorative in itself but functional, intended to provide a key, that is, a rough surface to which gesso and paint could adhere. In other words, what looks plain today may once have been brightly coloured.

Kells Priory, founded for Augustinian canons, was home to a substantial collection of medieval graveslabs, and this example is thought to date stylistically to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. At some point after its original use as a grave marker, the slab was turned over and hollowed out along its underside, repurposed as a slop-stone in the priory kitchens. A slop-stone was essentially a drain basin, used for disposing of waste water, which gives a particular edge to this object's trajectory: from a marked grave, presumably for a specific individual, to a piece of kitchen furniture. The slab was recorded intact as recently as 1980, when it was drawn by researchers. It has since been broken into numerous pieces as a result of vandalism.