Kilkea Castle (Kildare) This amazing and beautifully-carved group can be seen high on the front of a castle which has been converted to an expensive modern hotel! Dated (by the shoes) to the 15th century, this has been interpreted as the Temptation of St Anthony - a theme of the Irish Scripture Crosses. The saint, with mask-like head and bared teeth, is about to be penetrated by a boar-headed beast wearing a quilted jacket, while another ithyphallic beast attacks his buttocks. At the same time, a bird resembling a peacock is attacking his left nipple, rather as hellish beasts attack the female figures of Romanesque Luxuria carvings.

Lloyd Graham writes:

It is possible that the "Kilkea carving served the same purpose as the well-known Sheela-na-Gig statues
that adorn some medieval churches in (and indeed beyond) Ireland.

In fact, it was widely accepted in Ireland that Sheelas were intended as antidotes to the Evil Eye;

Edith Guest even reports that “Two of the sheela-na- gigs are or have been called Evil Eye Stones, i.e. Carrick and Cashel.”

Conversely, a bizarre story told about the Kilkea stone relates that “what is here described as a male figure is
instead a female one and that she ‘nurtures at the breast an eagle.’”

This may have been an attempt to reconcile the clearly masculine sexualised figure (complete with flowing beard!)
with the better-known female Sheela-na-Gig, who served the same apotropaic purpose.
The belief that Sheelas were deterrents to the Evil Eye raises the interesting question of whether these enigmatic and highly sexualised
figurines might not also owe something to the sexually-charged “All-Suffering Eye...”

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