The Sheela-na-Gig of Rodel Church

St Clement's Church, Rodel, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

The richly carved 16th-century tomb of Alasdair MacLeod at Rodel includes a sheela-na-gig — a female fertility figure of pre-Christian type — incorporated into Christian iconography. The figure is rubbed smooth from centuries of touching.

St Clement's Church at Rodel, at the southern tip of Harris, is the most architecturally elaborate medieval church in the Outer Hebrides. It was built in the early 16th century by Alasdair Crotach MacLeod, 8th chief of MacLeod, as his own tomb-church. The interior contains his elaborately carved wall-tomb — one of the finest pre-Reformation tomb sculptures in Scotland, executed by an unknown master mason in 1528 — and several other MacLeod tombs of later date. Among the carvings of the tomb wall — apostles, hunters, ships, ecclesiastical symbols — is a small, almost-hidden figure of a naked woman holding open her vulva with both hands. She is a sheela-na-gig, a type of explicit female fertility figure common in medieval Irish and Welsh churches and rarer in Scotland. The Rodel sheela is unusual in being incorporated into an elite tomb rather than a doorway or font. The conventional academic interpretation of sheela-na-gigs is contested. Some scholars read them as anti-lust warnings; others as fertility blessings; others as apotropaic figures intended to ward off evil with the shock of their explicitness. The Rodel figure does not resolve the question. The Harris folkloric tradition is that the sheela protects the church and the MacLeod chiefs from the malice of pre-Christian beings. She has been touched, for centuries, by women hoping to conceive — her stone vulva is rubbed smooth from this and noticeably lighter in colour than the surrounding carving. The tradition was once specifically that a Harris woman who could not conceive should visit Rodel at the full moon, lay her hand on the sheela's figure, and ask the help of the older people. Several modern Harris families trace their existence to grandmothers who made this pilgrimage. The Church of Scotland, which owns Rodel today, neither encourages nor discourages the practice. The figure remains. The carving's smoothness is verified, measurable, and ongoing.