It was sitting in the middle of the building rather than in any position that made liturgical sense, and observers noted that it almost certainly had not started its life there. The font itself was clearly something worth remarking upon: it bore spiral fluting, a carved decorative detail that would have required considerable skill to produce and that set it apart from more plainly finished examples.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the font during his survey of Clare's ecclesiastical remains, published between 1900 and 1902, and his description of the spiral fluting is the most detailed account that survives. Before Westropp, the Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of nineteenth-century field observations compiled as part of the mapping of Ireland, had already noted the font's awkward position within the church, suggesting it had been moved at some earlier point, perhaps during repairs to the building or simply through the gradual disorder that settles over long-abandoned structures. At some point after Westropp's visit, the font disappeared entirely. Whether it was removed, buried, broken up, or quietly taken elsewhere is not recorded. What remains is essentially a locational record, marking the spot where something unusual once stood.