Fewer visitors notice the carved stone figure set into a south-facing window in the castle hall, and fewer still know quite what to make of her. She is a sheela-na-gig, one of those unsettling medieval carvings found across Ireland and Britain depicting an exaggerated female figure displaying her genitalia. The type is thought to have served as an apotropaic symbol, a ward against evil or perhaps a fertility emblem, though scholars continue to argue about their precise function and origin.

This particular figure is carved to the left and centre of a large rectangular slab. Her triangular head carries deep-set eyes, a grim mouth, and gritted teeth. The breasts are flat but sizeable and pendulous. Her arms loop behind her thighs to complete a circle, while her legs are widely splayed, set at right angles to the body before bending sharply at the knees. The vulva, sagging below the thighs, appears, in the words recorded by researcher Barbara Freitag in 2004, to be torn open by both hands to release some soft substance. The description alone gives a sense of the carving's intensity. She was not originally in her current location; during a twentieth-century restoration of Bunratty Castle, she was moved from the inner reveal of a window in the top room of the south-west tower, where she would have occupied a far more private and structurally significant position, embedded in the fabric of the building itself.

Visitors to Bunratty who want to find her should head into the castle hall and look to the south window. She is set into the stonework there, easy to overlook in the general business of touring the rooms, but worth pausing over. The shift from her original tower window to this more public setting is itself part of her story, a reminder that these figures have always moved between uses and meanings, placed, removed, and repositioned according to the needs and interpretations of each generation that encountered them.