She is a sheela-na-gig, a category of medieval exhibitionist carving found on churches and castles across Ireland and Britain, whose precise original purpose remains debated. What makes the figure at Kilsarkan East particularly striking is not just the carving itself but the layered life it has continued to live long after the church around it fell to ruin.

By 1942, when a folklore survey recorded local practice at the site, the figure was identified not as a sheela-na-gig at all but as St Arcon, the parish patron. Pilgrims came on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays throughout May, walking the graveyard three times, reciting a rosary on each circuit, and then going to the window to touch the carved image. Before leaving, they placed a holy book, typically a copy of the Messenger, at the foot of the old wall. The rounds were said for cures or for the souls of the dead. A survey carried out in 2007 by Laurence Dunne found that a newer custom had since developed alongside the older one: visitors were scratching crosses into the window's side stones, and into the sheela-na-gig herself, using a rough stone left on the sill for that purpose. The sill stone had cracked as a result. The carving, as described by researcher Freitag, has a triangular head with rope-like hair, a wedge nose, and a small open mouth; the genital area shows clear signs of rubbing, consistent with centuries of ritual touch.

The church at Kilsarkan East is in poor condition, its eastern elevation swallowed by ivy and impossible to examine fully. Only the eastern gable and most of the southern wall remain upstanding. The ogee-headed limestone window in the southeast corner, with its sheela-na-gig set at the apex, is the most legible feature left. A broken piscina, a small stone basin once used for washing communion vessels, sits just to the east of the window in the same corner. The site slopes from south to north on an elevated position, and the views outward to the north, west, and east are wide and open, a sharp contrast to the enclosure of the ivy-clad walls within.