What makes it worth a second look is its geometry: the upper third is squared off in the conventional way, but the lower two-thirds have been so deeply chamfered at the angles that the block effectively becomes an octagon, a transitional form that gives the whole object an almost architectural quality, as though the carver were working out two ideas at once.

The font is thought to date from the late medieval period, a broad designation that in an Irish ecclesiastical context generally points to somewhere in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Chamfering, the cutting away of a right-angled edge to produce a flat or bevelled face, was a common technique in medieval stonework, used on everything from door jambs to tomb surrounds, but its effect here is unusually pronounced, reshaping the lower body of the font rather than simply softening its corners. The church itself, dedicated to St Lachtain, an early Irish saint associated with the Freshford area, is a medieval structure, and the font belongs to that broader fabric of carved limestone that survives in and around the building. It now rests on a modern octagonal base, added at some later point to stabilise or display it.