The stone in question is a window sill, and it is not plain work: foliage grows from the mouth of an animal carved at its centre, and beside that interlace sits a sheela-na-gig, the enigmatic figurative carvings found across Ireland and Britain, typically depicting a female figure with exaggerated or exposed anatomy, whose exact meaning and function continue to be debated by scholars. This one is small, only about twenty centimetres tall, and the waist area has suffered some damage over the centuries, but the breasts remain visible, the legs are flexed, and the hands are entwined with stylised animals in a manner that gives the figure an oddly animated quality.

The carving is dated to around 1200, placing it firmly in the Romanesque tradition, and its style is consistent with the decorated sill it shares. That sill is now inverted over the window opening, which means the composition, originally designed to be read one way up, must now be approached at an angle, literally and figuratively. The church at Rath, to which all of this stonework belongs, provides the broader architectural context, but it is the repurposing of this piece that makes it quietly puzzling. Whether the sill was moved and flipped during a repair, a rebuilding, or simple convenience is not recorded. The scholarly record traces the carving through Guest in 1936 and Andersen in 1977 before Harbison revisited the dating in 2000, suggesting it has attracted steady if specialist attention for the better part of a century.