The rendering on the surrounding stonework has been brought right up to its edge, as though the figure were simply being tolerated rather than celebrated. It is a sheela-na-gig, one of those deeply curious carved female figures found on medieval Irish churches and castles, typically depicted in a pose that leaves little to the imagination, arms bent at the elbows and hands drawing attention to an exaggerated vulva. Their purpose has been debated for generations, with theories ranging from fertility symbol to apotropaic charm intended to ward off evil. The Shanrahan example is a squat, roughly worked piece, carved in high relief. It has large projecting ears, a barely defined nose, a depressed mouth, and asymmetric eyes, one rendered as a simple hollow, the other as an incised almond shape. The neck is unusually long and thick relative to the compact body, and the short legs are slightly splayed.

What makes this particular figure slightly more puzzling than most is that it is almost certainly not where it started out. The tower on which it sits appears to date from the eighteenth century, while the sheela-na-gig itself is thought to be of fifteenth-century origin. Somewhere between those two periods it was displaced and reset into the later structure, a common enough fate for carved stones that were too significant, or perhaps too unsettling, simply to discard. The figure sits immediately below a blocked opening at second-floor level, which suggests it was incorporated into the tower fabric during construction rather than appended later. There is also a second sheela-na-gig at the site, positioned on the east gable of the church itself, making Shanrahan one of the relatively rare places where two of these figures survive in close proximity.