They are easy to walk past without a second glance, but look closely and you will find something genuinely odd: a pair of nude, armless female figures carved in high relief, described by one early twentieth-century scholar as copies of sheela-na-gigs, those deliberately grotesque female carvings found on medieval Irish churches and castles, apparently made to flank a tomb rather than ward off evil from a doorway.

The columns originally formed part of the altar-tomb mausoleum of Dulamus Barry, who died in 1633. The tomb was positioned, according to the seventeenth-century traveller Dineley, on the left-hand side of a chapel leading up to the altar of the abbatial church at Abington. It was still intact in 1887, when it was photographed and recorded with the female figures still in place on either side. Sometime after that, the carved stones were removed to Clonshavoy House along with other carved material from the site. An elderly local man named Hayes, who had a personal connection to the Barry tomb, was so unhappy with this that he retrieved the figures himself and re-erected them where they had always stood. Writing in 1907, Seymour noted that a nearby slab, possibly also part of the same monument, shows Christ on the cross flanked by the Virgin and St John in high relief, while W. R. Le Fanu, writing earlier in the Kilkenny Journal, recorded that the caryatid-like columns had been dug out of a mound just outside the graveyard boundary before being returned to their original context.

Abington graveyard is the kind of place that rewards a slow circuit rather than a direct approach. The two columns are in the south-west quadrant, and it helps to know that one is standing and one is prostrate, since neither announces itself. The surrounding landscape retains the outline of the former monastic complex, and the graveyard itself contains other carved stonework worth pausing over. There is no formal interpretive signage for the fragments, so a little background reading before arrival makes the difference between noticing them and understanding what you are looking at.