The townland of Fontstown in County Kildare takes its name from a font, which is an unusual enough distinction, and that font still exists, though only just. Sitting within a ruined church set inside a graveyard, what remains is roughly half of a square granite font with rounded corners, measuring around forty centimetres in length and thirty centimetres in height. The basin reaches a depth of eighteen centimetres, the rim averages about ten centimetres in width, and a small drain hole six centimetres in diameter is still visible. A baptismal font, in church use, was the vessel in which water was blessed and held for the sacrament of baptism, and the drain hole would have allowed that water to be disposed of reverently rather than simply tipped away. That this fragment survives at all, in a roofless church in a country churchyard, gives it a quiet persistence.

The fact that a place would come to be named after a single liturgical object suggests the font held some local significance well before the church itself fell into ruin. Fontstown's name preserves that significance even as the object itself has been reduced to a partial remnant in granite. The stone's durability is the reason anything survives at all; granite resists weathering far better than the lime mortars and softer stones that made up the church around it, and so the font outlasted its building.