A stone font that has outlasted the church it was made for tends to acquire a quiet dignity. This particular example, now kept in a Roman Catholic church in Coolbunnia, County Waterford, began its life in the medieval ruins of Faithlegg church, a short distance to the south. Circular in form, it measures roughly 67 centimetres across and 32 centimetres in height, with seven vertical ribs running around its outer surface and two small notches cut to hold a cover in place. Those notches are a telling detail: fonts were routinely covered and sometimes locked in the medieval period, partly to prevent the blessed water from being taken for use in folk magic or other unsanctioned purposes.

The font's existence was recorded by the Reverend Patrick Power, a prolific chronicler of Waterford's ecclesiastical landscape, in a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1890 and 1891. Power documented the ancient ruined churches of the county with considerable attention to surviving furnishings and fabric, and this font appears in his account of the Faithlegg site. By the time he was writing, the font had already made its short journey northward into the neighbouring Roman Catholic church, presumably at some point after Faithlegg fell out of use as a functioning place of worship. The transition from ruin to active church is not unusual for such objects; a well-made baptismal font, carved to last, was too valuable to leave exposed to the elements simply because its original building had collapsed around it.