The limestone figures, each rendered in high relief, rest with their feet on dogs, as was conventional for medieval funerary sculpture, but the upper slab carries a crack running clean across where the heads would have been, and the heads themselves are gone. One explanation, offered by the art historian John Hunt, is that their removal was the result of an old repair rather than any original deficiency in the stone. The tomb measures 2.2 metres in length and just over 90 centimetres in height, and it sits centrally within the 19th-century church, which was itself built on the former chancel of the 13th-century church of St Mary's.

The tomb is thought to have been commissioned by Piers Butler, who died in 1539, to commemorate his brothers Edmond and Theobald, both of whom had died before the turn of the 16th century. But commemoration alone may not have been the only motive. Piers and his wife Margaret FitzGerald, who died in 1542, are believed to have been responsible for several such Butler memorial tombs from this period, and scholars have read this programme of retrospective commemoration as a calculated effort to reinforce the prestige of the MacRichard Butlers during their disputed claim to the Earldom of Ormond. The tomb's carved panels carry this dynastic argument in stone. Running along the sides are sequences of heraldic shields, including the distinctive indented Butler coat of arms and what Hunt identified as the shield of St Michael, which the Butlers claimed as a hereditary possession of the house. The remaining arms shift into a different register entirely, depicting instruments of the Passion: a ladder, a whipping post, a seamless garment with three dice, a crown of thorns, a lance, and a sponge on a pole. The foot panel closes the scheme with a crucifixion scene carved in false relief, a technique in which figures are raised against a recessed background, showing Christ flanked by Our Lady and St John within a raised border.