Along the lower edge of a sixteenth-century limestone tomb in St. Brigid's Cathedral, Kildare, a sheela-na-gig crouches among grotesques, green men with foliage bursting from their mouths, and a figure blowing two trumpets simultaneously. It is not the company one necessarily expects on the tomb of a bishop, yet there it all is, carved in relief on a chamfered border beneath the solemn effigy of Walter Wellesley, who died in 1539. A sheela-na-gig is a carved female figure displaying exaggerated genitalia, found on medieval Irish churches and occasionally on secular buildings; their precise meaning remains debated, though they appear frequently enough in ecclesiastical contexts to suggest they were not considered straightforwardly inappropriate. On this tomb, they share space with angels bearing the Wellesley arms, saints, apostles, and a Latin inscription in incised Gothic lettering that identifies the deceased as formerly bishop of Kildare and commendatory prior of Great Connell Abbey.

The tomb has had an unusually complicated afterlife for an object of its quality. Walter Wellesley was buried at Great Connell Abbey, a few miles from Kildare town, but long after the abbey fell into ruin his tomb was broken apart and the fragments were built into the south face of the abbey graveyard's western wall, one either side of the entrance gate, where they functioned essentially as rubble. Photographs taken by Edwin Rae documented the pieces in that undignified position. In 1971 the County Kildare Archaeological Society arranged to have the fragments retrieved and transported to Kildare Cathedral, where the tomb was re-erected in the south transept on 17 July of that year. The reconstruction was imperfect in ways that are now themselves part of the object's history: the panels appear to have been carved by more than one hand, and the eastern side panel, which depicts Saints Andrew, Thaddeus, and Matthias, did not originally belong to this tomb at all. The western side panel, in two surviving sections, shows Saints John the Evangelist, Patrick, and Peter; the head end-panel carries an Ecce Homo; the foot end-panel a crucifixion. The effigy itself shows Wellesley vested in full episcopal dress, a crozier in his left hand, his right raised in blessing, his feet resting against a foliage-carved socle.

The tomb sits within a cathedral that also houses a substantial collection of cross slabs, grave slabs, and decorated stones ranging in date from the tenth to the seventeenth century, many of them gathered into the building for preservation. The Wellesley tomb is the most elaborate of these, and the marginal inscription, though it trails off unfinished in the original carving, has been resolved by scholars to read 1539 as the year of death.