It had occupied a quoin stone, the kind of corner block that holds a building's edge together, near the top of the west gable on the south-west corner of the nave. Whoever took it knew exactly what they were looking for: a sheela-na-gig, one of the enigmatic carved female figures found on medieval Irish churches and castles, typically depicted exposing an exaggerated vulva in a pose that scholars have argued over for generations without reaching any firm consensus on meaning.

The carving itself, described in detail by Barbara Freitag in her 2004 study of the subject, was unusual even by the standards of a figure type that rarely does anything by halves. Cut into a large but very thin rectangular slab of limestone, the figure was asymmetrical throughout. The head was triangular and earless, with bulbous eyes, a long nose, and an open mouth, set on a thin elongated neck. One breast had two nipples; both drooped over a round belly. The left arm was raised and bent at the elbow, with a spread hand touching the left side of the face, while the right arm reached down to the genitals, fingers entering an open vulva marked by a deep straight groove. The legs were wide apart, sharply bent at the knee, with feet turned outwards and the left leg raised higher than the right. The figure was positioned horizontally on the quoin stone, which set it apart from the more upright presentations seen elsewhere.

The theft has left a gap that is only partially filled. Approximately three hundred metres to the east, on the fortified well house of Kiltinan Castle, a second sheela-na-gig survives in situ. A fortified well house is exactly what it sounds like, a defended structure built to protect a water source, and its survival gives some sense of how densely this small area of Tipperary was once marked by these strange, watchful figures. A three-dimensional digital model of the stolen church carving, produced by Digital Heritage Age, exists online and offers the closest thing now available to a direct encounter with it.