It had spent an unknown stretch of time built into a roadside wall near Caherelly, east of the city, before road workers discovered it while repairing a culvert on a stream close to Black Castle. That it ended up in a wall at all was probably no accident of history but a deliberate act of reuse, possibly after the nearby castle was demolished in the nineteenth century.

The figure is a sheela-na-gig, a category of medieval stone carving found across Ireland and Britain, typically depicting a female figure in an explicit pose with exaggerated genitalia. Their precise purpose remains debated; theories range from fertility symbols to apotropaic carvings intended to ward off evil, and they appear on ecclesiastical buildings as often as secular ones. This example, catalogued by Barbara Freitag in 2004, is notable for diverging from the usual conventions of the type. Most sheela-na-gigs are depicted as gaunt, almost skeletal figures, but this one, carved in flat relief on local limestone, has a plump trunk and limbs and what Freitag describes as well-shaped, droopy but proportional breasts. The arms pass behind the legs, with the right hand lifting the lower part of the thigh. The navel is deeply incised, the pudenda oval and exaggerated, with a vertical groove cut below. Despite damage, including the loss of the head, the legs from the thighs down, and the left hand, the carving retains considerable detail and, according to Freitag, shows genuine skill.

The carving is now held at the Hunt Museum, which occupies Rutland House on the Ennis Road in Limerick City. The museum's collection spans a broad range of periods and object types, so the sheela-na-gig sits within a larger context rather than being displayed in isolation. For those who want to examine the figure more closely before or after a visit, Digital Heritage Age has produced a three-dimensional digital model of it, accessible on the Sketchfab platform at the link skfb.ly/6t6Mo, which allows the carving to be rotated and inspected in detail that a museum case does not always permit.