It is a sheela-na-gig, a category of medieval figurative carving found on churches and castles across Ireland and Britain, typically depicting a female figure explicitly displaying or manipulating her genitalia. The purpose of these figures remains debated; theories range from apotropaic charms intended to ward off evil, to warnings against lust, to survivals of pre-Christian fertility symbolism. The Redwood example is not a grand or imposing specimen, and that, in its own way, makes it worth attention.

Scholar Anthony Weir, writing in 1980, described the figure with an unusual frankness: a pathetic figure, he called it, rather crudely carved, the enormous head and spindly body giving it the look of an ice-cream cone. The legs are only very slightly splayed, and the arms hang asymmetrically, the right hand apparently holding the left wrist. What makes this carving technically notable is the gesture of the left hand, which pulls the large and pendent vulva from above, a posture that Weir noted as unusual within the broader corpus of sheela-na-gig carvings. The breasts are tiny, round, and asymmetrical. The face is dominated by large eyes, nose, and mouth, and grooves run along the sides of both head and body. There is something almost skeletal in the overall effect, less threatening than many examples of the type, and more quietly strange for it.