This one, though, carries a quiet significance that its battered condition does little to advertise. Octagonal in shape, just under half a metre tall, and carved from limestone with four wide and four narrow alternating panels whose lower sections are chamfered inwards, it sits between the ruins of a Church of Ireland building and the Malone family mausoleum. A baptismal font, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the stone vessel used to hold water for the Christian rite of baptism; this example appears to lack a drainage hole, which is unusual, and scholars have placed its manufacture in the post-Reformation period, meaning sometime after the mid-sixteenth century.

The site it belongs to has a considerably longer history. The church at Kilbixy was already established before the arrival of the Normans in Ireland, and it was granted by Geoffrey de Costentin to Ralph Petit, archdeacon of Meath, sometime between 1192 and 1218. The parish church is mentioned in documentary sources in 1259, again in 1492 in the Calendar of Papal Letters, and once more in 1540. By 1682, a writer named Piers recorded it as the remains of an ancient and well-built church, describing it as the mother of many churches and chapels in the surrounding area, and noting that it had once possessed a very well-built high tower or steeple at its west end. The roofless ruin visible today is not that medieval structure but a later replacement, constructed around 1800, which has itself since fallen into disrepair. The font, then, predates even that building, and outlasted whatever congregation once gathered around it.