What makes this particular example quietly unsettling is not just its subject matter, but the evidence of deliberate damage. Below the waist, the stone shows clear signs of hammering; the legs and genital area are only barely traceable now, the original carving reduced to near-ghost marks in the rock. Above the damage, a bony head with a grim face survives, along with flexed arms, both hands still reaching downward in the characteristic sheela pose. The figure was set into a rectangular slab and given a framing border, a patent reveal, when it was inserted into the bridge parapet, suggesting it was treated with at least some care at the time of its relocation, even if the mutilation had already been carried out.

Local tradition holds that the stone originally came from Newtown Castle, and that the defacement was carried out by a landowner approximately three generations before the early twentieth century, placing the damage somewhere in the Victorian period. The scholar Guest recorded the figure in 1936, and Andersen catalogued it in 1977, by which point it had been sitting in the bridge parapet for long enough that its canal-side setting had come to seem entirely ordinary. The bridge spans the Limerick to Killaloe Navigation Canal at Cloonlara, a waterway built to bypass the tidal and rocky stretches of the River Shannon in this area. That a carved medieval figure from a castle ended up mortared into an industrial-era navigation canal structure is the kind of quiet accident of Irish history that rarely gets a plaque.