It is a sheela-na-gig, a carved female form of a type found on medieval Irish and British buildings, typically characterised by exaggerated or explicit anatomy. This one is now displaced from wherever it was first installed, mortared into a wall beside the east end of the Augustinian Abbey as though someone simply needed to put it somewhere safe, or somewhere out of the way.

The carving, recorded and described by the scholar Barbara Freitag in 2004, is worked in high relief on a wedge-shaped slab measuring roughly half a metre tall and twenty centimetres wide. The figure has an oversized, swollen head with asymmetrical jug ears, a lined forehead, streaked cheeks, and bulbous eyes above a strong nose and small mouth. The ribs are clearly defined, though there are no breasts. One arm is missing entirely; the surviving left arm crosses the body, the hand resting on the lower abdomen with, as Freitag notes, surprisingly dainty fingers. The lower portion of the figure has been deliberately or accidentally defaced over time, so the genitals that would typically be the focal point of such a carving are no longer discernible. The legs are spindly, set wide apart, and the feet are gone. What survives is a figure caught somewhere between the grotesque and the curiously intimate.

The sheela-na-gig sits in the graveyard wall adjacent to the Augustinian Abbey, which is itself a well-preserved medieval complex in the centre of Fethard. The figure is on the north face of the wall, so worth seeking out deliberately rather than expecting to encounter it by accident. A 3D digital model of the carving, produced by Digital Heritage Age, is accessible via the Sketchfab platform at skfb.ly/6qPJS, which offers a useful way to examine the surface detail that might be difficult to read in the stone itself.