They are caryatid-like figures, meaning columns sculpted in the form of the human body, and they are strange objects to encounter in a graveyard: nude, armless female figures rendered in very high relief, described by one early twentieth-century observer as copies of sheela-na-gigs placed on either side of a tomb. A sheela-na-gig is a carved grotesque female figure found on medieval Irish churches and castles, often interpreted as apotropaic, intended to ward off evil. That a seventeenth-century tomb-builder apparently commissioned a variation on this ancient form for a burial monument makes these fragments unusual even by the standards of Irish funerary carving.

The columns originally formed part of the altar-tomb surround belonging to Dulamus Barry, who died in 1633, and were positioned within what Thomas Dineley described as a chapel leading up to the altar of the abbatial church at Abington. The tomb was still intact in 1887, when it was photographed with its figures in place. At some point after that, the columns were removed to Clonshavoy House along with other carved stones, but an old man named Hayes, who had a personal connection to the Barry family tomb, retrieved them and re-erected them himself. Writing in 1907, Seymour noted that W. R. Le Fanu had previously recorded the figures as having been dug out of a mound outside the graveyard altogether, suggesting the columns had already experienced some displacement before Hayes intervened. A carved slab nearby, depicting the Crucifixion flanked by the Virgin and Saint John, may also have formed part of the same tomb.

Abington graveyard contains the remains of a medieval Cistercian abbey, and the carved fragments sit within that broader monastic ruin. The two columns are located in the south-west quadrant of the graveyard; one stands upright and is reasonably visible, while the other lies on the ground and requires a closer look. The site is accessible, though it rewards patience and a willingness to move carefully among the older grave markers. The figures themselves are worn but legible, and the contrast between their archaic visual language and the 1633 date of the tomb they once adorned is worth sitting with for a moment.