Sitting inside the Roman Catholic church at Butlerstown in County Waterford is a small stone object that most visitors would probably walk past without a second glance. It is, by any measure, modest: a roughly circular stone mortar with an external diameter of just 31 centimetres and a height of 15 centimetres, distinguished by four projecting lugs on its outer surface. It is recorded as a font, the vessel used in baptismal rites, though its proportions are closer to what a pharmacist or a cook would recognise than to the elaborate baptismal fonts of medieval cathedrals.

The object did not begin its life in Butlerstown. It was moved from the ruins of Kilronan church, which stands approximately 350 metres to the south. The Reverend P. Power, writing in 1895 in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, identified it as a font from that earlier site, and the relocation to the functioning Catholic church was presumably intended to preserve it from further exposure or loss. Kilronan is a ruined medieval church, and the transfer of salvageable stonework from abandoned ecclesiastical sites to active ones was not uncommon in Ireland, particularly during the nineteenth century when interest in such antiquities was growing but formal preservation frameworks were limited. What makes this particular piece slightly puzzling is the question of whether it was ever a liturgical font at all. The dimensions are small even by the standards of early Irish fonts, and the form, a plain mortar with lugs, could have served any number of purposes before or after any religious use.

The object is inside the Catholic church at Butlerstown, which provides it some shelter and continuity of context, even if that context is not its original one. Anyone with an interest in early ecclesiastical stonework, or in the informal archaeology of repurposed objects, might find it worth examining closely.