The wall itself does double duty, serving simultaneously as a stretch of the old town wall, which gives the setting an oddly layered quality: civic fortification, sacred boundary, and funerary monument all compressed into the same stonework. The effigy, carved in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century according to the scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, lies displaced from its original context, a figure fixed in stone with no surviving inscription to anchor her to history.

The question of where this effigy actually came from is genuinely unresolved. The graveyard also contains the effigy of a Hackett knight, which was reputedly moved from the Hackett chapel inside the Franciscan friary roughly a hundred metres to the north-east, and the effigy of a Hackett lady is thought to have made the same journey. The Franciscan friary's Hackett chapel was, by the early eighteenth century, already remembered as a place where, as the chronicler Wadding noted in 1734, many tombs of the founders and other families had once been visible. It is quite possible that this unknown woman's effigy, along with at least one other in the same graveyard, originated there too, rather than in the medieval church of St John, which once stood on the site later occupied by the existing cathedral. The displacement of these effigies, and the uncertainty surrounding their origins, means that the woman carved in the niche may have been mourned, commissioned, and commemorated in an entirely different building from the one whose wall now holds her.