On the underside of a bishop's tomb capital, carved where few eyes would naturally fall, sits one of Ireland's more quietly startling medieval sculptures. A sheela-na-gig, the term used for a class of carved stone figures depicting a female form with exaggerated genitalia, appears on the tomb of Bishop Wellesley, who died in 1539. The placement is peculiar enough on its own terms, but the figure's condition adds another layer of strangeness: the head has been cut off, the arms are splayed outward with hands meeting over the pudenda, and the legs are spread wide with knees bent. It is a posture associated with the broader sheela-na-gig tradition, found on churches and castles across Ireland and Britain, though its exact meaning remains a matter of scholarly debate, with interpretations ranging from fertility symbol to apotropaic charm warding off evil.

The tomb was originally housed at Great Connell Priory, an Augustinian foundation in County Kildare. When the priory fell into ruin, the tomb did not remain in place indefinitely. It was eventually re-erected inside Kildare Cathedral, bringing the carved capital, sheela and all, into an active ecclesiastical setting. The proximity of a figure so archaic and so unambiguous in its imagery to the formal monuments of a medieval bishop is not unique in Irish churches, where pre-Christian or early medieval carved stones were sometimes incorporated into later structures without apparent concern for the incongruity. Whether the masons who placed it on Wellesley's tomb understood it as protective, decorative, or simply as a piece of available stone is not recorded.