A sheela-na-gig is a carved female figure, typically medieval, showing a woman with exaggerated or explicit genitalia, and they appear on churches and castles throughout Ireland and Britain, their precise meaning still debated by scholars. This example, a small limestone block measuring roughly 26 by 26 by 40 centimetres, carries the standard features of the type: a large round head with hollow ovoid eyes, flat nose, wide open mouth, and a body seated on its haunches with knees splayed and arms drawing attention to the genital area. But it also has something unusual even by the standards of its genre: a ring of seven holes drilled around the genital region, an additional hole at the base of the stone, two holes in the top of the flat head, and a further hole under the chin. The left hand, notably, appears to hold a round object. Scholar Barbara Freitag has described it as one of the best known Irish sheelas precisely because of these features, suggesting they point to some ritualistic use beyond mere decorative carving.

The figure is believed to have originally been set into the eastern gable of the old church of St Kieran, a building that no longer stands. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was already attracting attention: the Dublin Penny Journal, in its third volume published across 1834 and 1835, described a grotesque figure in freestone projecting from the wall of the eastern gable, approximately one and a half feet long, positioned some distance from an old freestone window-frame. That published notice is one of the earliest records of the carving and gives a sense of how the church looked before it was lost. The figure eventually made its way into the collections of the National Museum of Ireland, as noted by Cherry in 1992.

The carving is now held at the National Museum of Ireland, which has sites in Dublin city. Given that the church of St Kieran no longer exists, the museum is the only place to encounter this object directly. Visitors with a specific interest in sheela-na-gigs or medieval stone carving should be aware that such pieces are not always on permanent public display, and it is worth checking with the museum in advance about access to the collection. The physical details reward close attention: the striations on the cheeks, the deeply incised ribcage, and above all those drilled holes, which remain unexplained and quietly strange.