The font arrived in the chapel yard as a rescued object; it left as a buried one.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan recorded that the square cut-stone base and circular shaft of the Coolcraheen baptismal font had been moved to Conahy chapel yard from the old church at Coolcraheen by Canon Hogan, the parish priest. The relocation was, in its way, an act of preservation, removing the font from a ruined or disused building to a place where it might be looked after. That intention did not hold. When the chapel at Conahy was renovated during the 1960s, the font was apparently broken in the course of the work, and the pieces were buried on the site. By 1987, when the yard was visited by a researcher, no trace of the font could be found above the surface. The trail ends there, with a secondhand account of breakage and a burial that was never intended as a formal interment.