Sitting in the porch of a 19th-century church in Ballymore Eustace, a squat granite font has quietly outlasted the building that now shelters it by the better part of a millennium. It is an object easy to pass without registering its age, yet the stone itself may date to the 12th century, making it a survival from a period of intense ecclesiastical reorganisation in Ireland, when the Norman church was beginning to reshape an older monastic landscape.

The font is a cylindrical block of granite, 0.77 metres in diameter and 0.47 metres high, with a bowl cut into its upper surface measuring 0.54 metres across and roughly 0.25 metres deep. The bowl's walls are almost straight rather than curved, and its base is flat, with a small central drain-hole 0.09 metres in diameter, the practical detail that confirms its function: fonts of this kind were used for baptism by affusion, water poured over the head, and the drain allowed the blessed water to be directed back into consecrated ground rather than lost to ordinary drainage. The rim of the bowl is flat but has fractured at one point and was at some stage patched with concrete, a modest repair that does nothing to diminish the object's antiquity. Bradley and colleagues noted the font in their 1986 survey, placing it among a graveyard site that carries its own separate record.