It is an odd thing to place above a tomb door, and odder still when you learn that the stone itself is almost certainly medieval, salvaged from the ruins of a Cistercian monastery that once stood on the same ground.

Abbeydorney monastery lies half a mile north-east of Abbeydorney village, its remains occupying the western angle of what is now a large rectangular graveyard. The site was Cistercian, and the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the monastery standing at the north-east boundary of a roughly circular earlier graveyard, the kind of shape that often signals long and layered use. The circular plan has since been overtaken by extensions to the east, but the older core survives, and some of the tombs within it were built using architectural fragments taken directly from the cloister and abbey. The vault of the King family, positioned immediately south of the south-east angle of the church, is one such structure. It is a 19th-century construction assembled, at least in part, from pieces of the medieval fabric, and it is into this fabric that the carved figure was presumably set, having once formed part of the Cistercian building itself.

The figure is crudely worked: a flat nose, rounded eyes, large protruding ears, legs slightly apart as though in motion. The right hand draws the right earlobe downward; the left arm hangs at the side with a clenched fist near the buttocks. Whether that fist is grasping something drawn across the waist, or whether the carving depicts a man displaying his genitals, remains genuinely uncertain. What seems clearer is that this is not a sheela-na-gig, the more commonly discussed category of medieval exhibitionist carving that typically depicts a female figure with exaggerated genitalia, often found on Romanesque churches and tower houses across Ireland. This figure appears instead to represent a male counterpart, a rarer type, and its migration from monastic wall to vault entrance makes its survival all the more unlikely.