Outside the parish church of Newcastle, on a south-facing slope in Ardeenloun, sits a baptismal font that has been left to its own devices just north of the church wall. It is not inside, displayed or protected, but outdoors, exposed to the same Waterford weather as the graves surrounding it. That slight wrongness of placement is worth pausing over.

The font is octagonal, measuring roughly 57 centimetres across and 45 centimetres in height, with a subrectangular basin inside measuring 41 by 41 centimetres and about 23 centimetres deep. Octagonal fonts are a recognisable type in medieval church architecture, the eight sides traditionally associated with baptismal theology, but this one sits unhoused in a subrectangular graveyard rather than within the body of the church it belongs to. The church itself and the enclosing graveyard are documented features of the site, and roughly 70 metres to the northwest lies a castle site, suggesting that this was once a more substantial settlement than the quiet slope now implies. References in the antiquarian literature go back to the 1870s and 1890s, with notes by Martin and Power recording the site in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.