Somewhere between folk art, apotropaic symbol, and medieval mystery, the sheela-na-gig is one of the most discussed and least explained figures in Irish archaeology: a carved stone female figure, typically displaying an exaggerated vulva, thought by some scholars to ward off evil and by others to carry complex meanings that no single theory has yet resolved. What makes the example now held in Lismore particularly interesting is its journey. It did not come from Lismore at all.

The figure was originally found at the graveyard in Tallow, a small market town in County Waterford roughly twelve kilometres from Lismore. Graveyards are among the more common findspots for sheela-na-gigs in Ireland, often because carved stones were reused as building material over the centuries, incorporated into church walls or grave surrounds long after their original context had been forgotten. At some point the Tallow figure was removed from that setting and brought to the Library in Lismore, where it is now kept. The transfer from a rural graveyard to a library shelf is a quietly telling arc: a carving once embedded in a landscape of the dead, now preserved in a civic institution in a nearby town.