A Lawrence collection photograph from the late nineteenth century tells a different story: a limestone font with an octagonal shaft, set into a square base decorated with beaded moulding on all sides. By 1938, an Office of Public Works report noted the font had been knocked half sideways. Sometime after that, the shaft and its base disappeared entirely, leaving only this worn remnant on the eastern side of the ruined church.

The abbey itself has a layered past that makes even its fragmentary remains worth pausing over. Ballinskelligs Priory was founded around 1210 by the Arroasian Canons of the Order of St Augustine, a reforming branch of the Augustinians who followed a rule derived from the abbey of Arrouaise in northern France. The community originated from Rattoo, in north Kerry, but its deeper roots stretched further out to sea. Before the mid-eleventh century, the early monastic community of Skellig Michael, the famously remote island monastery eight miles off the Kerry coast, had transferred to this mainland location, driven off the rock by its increasingly hazardous conditions. The priory that grew here nonetheless retained possession of the Great Skellig and continued to use the Latin alias 'de Rupe Michaelis', meaning 'of the rock of Michael', a name that kept the island connection alive long after the monks had left it. When Lynch documented the font in 1902, he was recording a church already long dissolved, one that had quietly absorbed centuries of monastic continuity from one of the most isolated religious outposts in early medieval Europe.