The result is a single slab that functions simultaneously as a gravestone and as a sheela-na-gig, the term for those carved stone figures of women, found across medieval Irish ecclesiastical and secular buildings, whose meaning continues to be debated by scholars. That double life is what makes this particular example so quietly unusual.

The figure was found in the gardens of Kilmokea House on Great Island, Campile, County Wexford, and is presumed to have originated in the adjacent cemetery. It is now held in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. The stone itself is a wedge-shaped schistose slab, measuring 0.84 metres tall and tapering from 0.3 metres wide at the top to 0.25 metres at the base. One face carries the headstone inscription reading 'MB.D. 12 March 1705.a 72', recording what appears to be a death at the age of seventy-two. The other face bears the sheela carving, which scholar Barbara Freitag, writing in 2004, describes as crude and somewhat atypical. The figure is outlined by incised grooves rather than sculpted in relief: a head shaped roughly like an American football and entirely without facial features, connected to the torso not by a carved neck but by a circular hole approximately four centimetres deep. Freitag notes that only one other known sheela, the example from Seir Kieran in County Offaly, shares this distinctive feature of a hole at the neck position. The shoulders are angular, the breasts indicated by two neatly carved holes in the chest, the arms run straight down toward the genital area, and the legs are spread and straight, without feet. Traces of a horizontal line and two vertical lines survive between the legs.

The stone is held in the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin, which makes it straightforwardly accessible compared to sheelas still fixed to church walls or kept in local heritage centres. Its catalogue reference is DU018-295----. Visitors specifically interested in the carving should ask staff about its current location within the collections, as display arrangements can change. The inscription on the reverse is worth examining closely alongside the figure: the proximity of a dated burial record to a carving of such ambiguous, pre-Christian character raises questions about what the person who reused this stone understood, or cared, about what was already on it.