A sheela-na-gig is a carved stone figure, typically female and explicitly sexual in pose, found on medieval churches and tower houses across Ireland. Their precise purpose remains debated, but they appear most often flanking doorways, as if standing guard or issuing some kind of warning. The one at Blackhall in County Kildare occupied exactly this position, set to the right-hand side of the entrance to the tower house there, where any person passing through would have been hard-pressed to miss it.

At some point before 2004, a storm brought down the entire eastern section of the tower house. The carving survived, retrieved from the rubble and re-set in a niche cut into the interior of the north wall. It is a quietly significant act of preservation. Sheela-na-gigs are easily lost, damaged during periods of religious disapproval or simply buried and forgotten when the structures they adorned collapse. That this one was recognised, recovered, and given a new home within the same ruin says something about the value placed on it, even after the building that originally gave it context had partially fallen away.