Rectangular in form with a circular bowl and a central drain-hole, it is a modest but purposeful object, made for the practical ritual of baptism and shaped to let the water draw away cleanly after use. Fonts of this kind were the threshold objects of medieval parish life, the first point of contact between a newborn and the institutional church, and this one has outlasted the building that once gave it shelter and meaning.

The church itself, dedicated according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905 to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, stands on an artificially raised area of ground, roughly fifty metres to the south-south-east of Ballytobin house. The deliberate elevation of a church site was not unusual in medieval Ireland, serving both practical and symbolic purposes, lifting the sacred space above the surrounding landscape and, in some cases, making use of earlier earthworks. Carrigan's four-volume history of the diocese of Ossory remains one of the more thorough early accounts of ecclesiastical sites in Kilkenny, and his noting of the dedication here at least preserves something of the church's original identity, even as the structure itself has fallen away around its fittings.