What makes it worth pausing over is the detail: a civilian figure, not a knight or a bishop, dressed in a kirtle, which is a long fitted garment common to both men and women in the medieval period, and a short shoulder cape. The feet, shown in shoes rather than armour or bare, rest on a small dog, an image that in medieval funerary carving traditionally signified fidelity or companionship. On either side of the head, which rests on a cushion, angels attend. The whole thing is carved in high relief, meaning the figure stands proud of the stone surface rather than being simply incised into it, giving it a sculptural weight that flat grave slabs rarely achieve.

The slab is dateable to the early fourteenth century, placing it in the decades around 1300 to 1330, a period when this kind of civilian effigial carving was beginning to appear more widely in Ireland alongside the more familiar military and ecclesiastical examples. The stone itself tapers slightly from top to base and is just over a metre in height, with chamfered edges, meaning the sides are cut at an angle rather than left square. It is now cemented to the inner face of the east gable of the church, which suggests it was at some point moved or repositioned from wherever it originally lay, possibly from a floor tomb or an external location. John Hunt, who catalogued medieval figure sculpture across Ireland in his foundational 1974 study, noted this piece in his first volume.

The church at Ballyhay is a roofless ruin, as many medieval parish churches in Cork remain, and the slab sits in the open air of the surviving gable. The figure's identity is unrecorded, but the civilian dress and the care of the carving suggest someone of local consequence, remembered now only by the stone itself.