It was not made for the outdoors. Subcircular in shape, measuring roughly 65 by 75 centimetres and about 23 centimetres deep, with a central drain-hole worn into its basin, it is the kind of object that belongs inside a church. The fact that it ended up outside one tells a particular story about survival.

The font originally stood in Killinure church, where it would have held holy water for baptism and blessing. During the Penal Laws, the period stretching broadly across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Catholic worship was suppressed or severely restricted in Ireland, the church fell out of use and Mass moved to the open air. A spot a few perches from Burke's Cross became one of those informal gathering places, known as Mass rocks, where congregations met in fields or at roadsides under threat of prosecution. The font was carried from Killinure churchyard to serve its original purpose at these outdoor celebrations. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted that it remained at Burke's Cross in his day, describing it as rough and unhewn freestone, comparable in character to fonts he had observed at Srahane and Killeen. The basin he measured at fourteen inches in diameter and nine inches deep. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1841 or 1909, suggesting it was either overlooked by surveyors or simply not considered a feature worth marking, which makes Carrigan's record all the more valuable.