It is a holy water stoup, the kind of basin placed near a church entrance or within the building so that the faithful can bless themselves on entering. This one, however, is notably crude in its making: a sub-rectangular block of conglomerate stone, just 24 centimetres tall, with a shallow hollowed depression worked into its surface and a modest lip running around the edge. What makes it worth pausing over is not its craft but its origin.

The stoup is said to have been brought from the medieval church at Ballybacon, a ruined ecclesiastical site not far away in the same county. A baptismal font elsewhere inside the same church is attributed to the same source, which suggests that when the old Ballybacon church fell out of use or into decay, at least some of its fittings were carefully preserved rather than left to the elements. This kind of quiet salvage was not uncommon in Ireland during and after the upheavals of the post-medieval centuries, when older sacred sites were abandoned and newer Catholic parishes were being established, often with very limited resources. Bringing a font or a stoup from a venerable predecessor site carried both practical and symbolic weight, connecting a new congregation to a much older tradition of worship on the same landscape.