The figure is a sheela-na-gig, a category of medieval carving found across Ireland and Britain depicting a naked female form with exaggerated or explicit genitalia, typically found embedded in church or castle walls and thought by some scholars to function as apotropaic symbols, warding off evil, though their true purpose remains debated. This particular example had been built into the wall of a schoolhouse erected in 1842, itself a relatively recent structure in historical terms, which makes the figure's earlier history all the more opaque. Where it came from before that, nobody knows.

The carving was retrieved from the rubble and is now in private ownership in Rathealy. It survives in considerable detail. Carved in false relief on a wedge-shaped slab of pure crystalline limestone, it measures 0.75 metres in height, tapering from 0.35 metres at the top to 0.25 metres at the base. The description provided by scholar Barbara Freitag is precise and striking: a round head tilted slightly to the left, ears hollowed out from the centre, eyes formed from similar hollowed cavities, with a small punctured hole near the pupil of the left eye. The mouth is suggested by three holes along a horizontal slot, with one further hole in the chest near the left arm. The figure has a thin neck, angular shoulders, tiny breasts attached to the collarbone, and a very pronounced ribcage extending over the abdomen, with the navel marked by a circle. The arms lie close to the body and pass behind the legs, the hands grasping an elongated vulva that hangs between widely splayed thighs. The right leg is longer, with a large foot and toes turning outwards; the left foot is not clearly discernible. It is, in short, a figure of considerable anatomical intention, carved by someone who knew exactly what they were making.

Because the piece is in private hands, it is not accessible to the general public, and its original location, wherever it stood before being incorporated into that nineteenth-century schoolhouse wall, remains unknown. It exists now as an object whose biography has been largely erased, leaving only the carving itself as evidence that someone, at some point well before 1842, thought it worth preserving.