She lies in the wall rather than beneath the ground, her niche forming part of the old town wall itself, that defensive perimeter now quietly absorbed into sacred and funerary space. What makes her situation particularly curious is that nobody is certain she belongs here at all.

The effigy dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, according to the art historian John Hunt, who described it in detail in his 1974 study of Irish medieval figure sculpture. Around the same graveyard stands the effigy of a Hackett knight, a figure connected to a prominent local family, and that effigy is understood to have originated not in this site but in the Franciscan friary that stood roughly a hundred metres to the north-east. The same friary contained a Hackett family chapel, and a seventeenth-century source, the Franciscan historian Luke Wadding, noted in 1734 that many tombs of the founders and associated families had once been visible there. A second Hackett effigy, that of a woman associated with the same family, is also believed to have come from the friary. Given this pattern of displacement, it is considered likely that the unknown woman in the limestone niche, along with at least one other effigy in the graveyard, was also moved from the friary at some point, rather than deriving from the earlier medieval church of St John that once occupied the cathedral's present ground. The church of St John was itself demolished and replaced by the existing cathedral building.

The result is a graveyard where the monuments have quietly migrated, their original contexts dissolved by the same centuries that eroded the identities of the people they represent. The unknown woman remains unnamed, her origins uncertain, her resting place borrowed from a building that no longer stands.