In an unenclosed graveyard in County Kildare, the grass has long since reclaimed the walls of a medieval church, leaving only low, turf-covered foundations rising faintly from a slight ridge in the ground. Within what would have been the nave, two stone fragments sit quietly in the open: pieces of an octagonal, moulded font and its octagonal base, likely dating to the fifteenth century. A baptismal font of this kind was the ritual centrepiece of any parish church, the vessel over which infants were received into the Christian community, and the octagonal form was a deliberate choice in medieval ecclesiastical design, the eight sides carrying symbolic associations with resurrection and renewal. That these fragments remain in place, rather than removed to a museum or incorporated into later building work, gives the site an unguarded quality that is increasingly rare.

The church at Belan is now little more than an outline in the earth, its fabric reduced to foundation courses and these two carved stone remnants. The moulding on the font fragments suggests a degree of craft and local investment in the building during the 1400s, a period when many smaller Irish parish churches were being refurbished or newly equipped. Without standing walls or a roof to shelter them, the stones are exposed to whatever the Kildare weather brings, their carved surfaces slowly weathering in the same graveyard that continues, by all appearances, to sit open and unenclosed on its low rise.