It is a baptismal font, broken, its subrectangular basin still legible in form, cut in a V-shape in section and pierced at the base with a drain-hole. A font of this kind would once have held water for the sacrament of baptism, the drain-hole allowing the blessed water to be disposed of into consecrated ground rather than simply poured away. That functional detail, small and practical, is one of the things that makes the object oddly moving: it was made with care and used with intention, and here it remains, fractured but still recognisable.

The graveyard at Balisland is itself a recorded archaeological site, and the font belongs to a tradition of early ecclesiastical stonework found at such enclosures across Wicklow and the wider Irish landscape. Granite is an unforgiving material to carve, dense and coarse-grained, and the fact that this basin was shaped at all speaks to the presence of a functioning Christian community at the site. Without more detailed records it is difficult to assign a precise date, but fonts of this general type are associated with early medieval and later medieval church sites in Ireland, places that often predate the parishes that eventually replaced them.