What makes it quietly remarkable is that the wall into which it is embedded is not merely a graveyard boundary; it forms part of the old town wall itself, so the figure rests at a junction of civic and sacred boundaries, displaced from wherever she was first intended to lie.

The effigy is believed to represent a woman of the Hackett family, identified by a partially legible inscription along the upper edge of the left-hand side of the tomb, which reads: IO…HACK…ETT IL…ALI. An effigial tomb is one that bears a carved likeness of the deceased in recumbent pose, and this example has been dated by the scholar John Hunt to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. It almost certainly did not originate here. Hunt and others have suggested that this tomb, along with a nearby effigy of a Hackett knight, was originally housed in the Hackett Chapel of the Franciscan Friary that once stood close by. The Franciscan Luke Wadding, writing in 1734, recorded that the Hackett Chapel had contained many tombs of the founders and other associated families, implying the Hacketts held a position of some importance as patrons of the friary. How and when the effigies were removed and repositioned into the town wall is not recorded, but the displacement itself tells a story of dissolution, dispersal, and the quiet reuse of sacred stonework that followed the suppression of the religious houses.

The niche is at the southern end of the wall's south-eastern stretch, within the graveyard that surrounds the cathedral complex on the Rock of Cashel. The partial inscription is legible on close inspection, and a second Hackett effigy, that of the knight, can be found nearby, making it possible to consider the two figures together as remnants of what was once a more deliberate family memorial.