Officially catalogued as a font in two successive national surveys, it is in fact a stoup, a shallow wall-mounted or freestanding basin for holy water that would originally have been placed just inside a church entrance so that worshippers could bless themselves on the way in. The distinction matters: fonts are used for baptism and typically occupy a more prominent position within a church interior, while a stoup is a humbler, functional object, positioned at the threshold as a small act of ritual preparation.

The stone was described by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, in his four-volume history of the diocese of Ossory, as a granite holy water font with a rectangular cavity measuring nine inches by eight inches and two and a half inches deep. The object itself is a roughly dressed sub-rectangular granite boulder, approximately 39 centimetres by 37 centimetres at the base and 28 centimetres tall. The carved basin is slightly larger at the rim than at the bottom, splaying inward as it deepens, a simple but deliberate shaping of the stone. It is associated with Clonamery church and currently sits just 30 centimetres outside the building, close to the north jamb of the west doorway, which places it very near where it would once have been used, even if it is no longer set into the wall where it originally belonged.