What makes Drynan House linger in the memory, though, is not the house itself but a single carved stone figure that was taken from one of its gate posts in the 1940s and quietly deposited in the National Museum in Dublin, where it remains today.

The figure in question is a sheela-na-gig, a type of carved stone image found on medieval and early modern buildings across Ireland and Britain, typically depicting a female figure in an exaggerated pose that scholars have long debated but never conclusively explained. Their presence on church walls, castles, and manor houses remains one of the more persistent puzzles of Irish architectural history. The house from which this one was removed was, according to historian Flanagan, a Jacobean mansion built during the reign of Charles I, placing its construction somewhere in the first half of the seventeenth century. That it retained a sheela-na-gig on a gate post into the twentieth century is itself an unusual detail; such carvings were often discarded, built over, or lost entirely during later renovations. This particular example was recorded by Dunlea in 1945, the same year its removal to the museum was documented.

There is nothing to see at the Drinan site today beyond a modern residential development. The sheela-na-gig, catalogued as DU012-024002, is held in the National Museum of Ireland, and that is where any serious engagement with this object now has to begin. The museum's collections include a number of such carvings, and staff can often provide context on individual pieces. For those interested in the Jacobean period in the Dublin hinterland more broadly, the loss of Drynan House to suburban development is a fairly common story, which makes the survival of even a single carved stone from its gate posts a slightly unexpected thread back to the seventeenth century.