Tucked into the stonework of Kilkea Demesne in County Kildare is a carving known as the Temptation Stone, a 15th-century piece that raises more questions than it answers. The figure is believed to be an exhibitionist carving, a category of medieval stonework that includes the better-known sheela-na-gig, figures characterised by exaggerated or explicitly displayed anatomy, thought to carry apotropaic, moral, or ritual significance depending on who you ask. What makes this particular example notable is its physical circumstances: it survives not as an in-situ architectural feature but as a re-used decorated quoin, meaning the carved stone was taken from one structure and incorporated into another, a common enough fate for worked stone in medieval Ireland but one that tends to obscure original context considerably.

The stone sits within a machicolation, the kind of projecting parapet gallery built out from castle walls to allow defenders to drop objects on attackers below. This one has been re-assembled, suggesting the structure it belongs to has been altered or partially reconstructed at some point. A console forming part of the same machicolation carries a separate carving of a monkey, an animal that appeared regularly in medieval ecclesiastical and secular decoration, often used to satirise human vanity or folly. Whether the monkey and the exhibitionist figure were always intended to be read together is not clear, but their proximity on a re-assembled structure leaves open the possibility that the arrangement is partly accidental. The attribution to the 15th century and the broader architectural description come from Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1986.