A water font, in this context, is a stone basin designed to hold holy water, typically fixed into a wall or set near the entrance of a church. This one, along with a companion piece, ended up in a private garden, which is precisely the kind of quiet displacement that tells you something has gone wrong, or at least gone sideways, somewhere in the historical record.

Both fonts originally came from the South Abbey in Youghal, a Franciscan friary founded in the thirteenth century and suppressed during the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. After suppression, the buildings of such houses were frequently quarried, repurposed, or simply left to decay, and their fittings scattered. Stone was too useful to leave untouched, and carved ecclesiastical pieces often found their way into domestic settings over the following centuries, sometimes as curiosities, sometimes as building material, and occasionally out of something closer to reverence. How these two fonts made the journey from the abbey to the garden of Strand House is not recorded, but the fact that they were kept together and preserved suggests they were recognised as a pair worth keeping.