 Of the thirty-one monuments on display at Govan Old, there is one sarcophagus, two cross-shafts, two upright cross-slabs, five hogbacks, and twenty-one recumbent cross-slabs.The Govan sarcophagus is a stone coffin with a carved exterior; it was rediscovered when the sexton was digging a grave in the south-east corner of the churchyard in December 1855, surrounded by roots from two elm trees.No human remains were found with the sarcophagus, so it is thought that it was buried at an earlier date to protect the monument, perhaps during the Scottish Reformation when iconoclasm was common practice.