It was not always a wall fixture. The slab was originally part of a coffin-shaped monument, a form of medieval grave marker that tapers from shoulder width down to the feet, mimicking the outline of the body beneath.\n\nThe slab dates to the 13th or 14th century and carries the lower terminal of an incised floriated cross, meaning the arms or stem of the cross end in carved leaf or flower motifs rather than plain lines. It is a modest but precise piece of work, the kind of decorative vocabulary found across medieval Kilkenny in a period when stone carving was a serious local craft. The writer William Carrigan, whose four-volume history of the diocese of Ossory appeared in 1905, noted the slab as part of a coffin-shaped monument, which suggests that even by then the full piece was incomplete or its original context unclear. Later scholarship by Manning, writing in 2012, placed it more precisely within the chancel space, just inside that northern doorway.