It was found not in a church or monastery but in the old church at Kyteler's Inn, the medieval building long associated with Alice Kyteler, the fourteenth-century Kilkenny woman tried for witchcraft in 1324. That a baptismal font, an object whose purpose is the formal entry of a soul into the Christian community, should turn up in such a location adds a layer of quiet incongruity to an already peculiar object.

The font is carved from limestone and decorated with flutes arranged in Romanesque pairs, a style of ornamental stonework associated with the rounded arches and repetitive geometric forms typical of Romanesque architecture, which flourished in Ireland roughly from the twelfth century. Fleur-de-lis motifs appear in relief on its surface, adding a detail more usually associated with heraldry or Continental ecclesiastical decoration. As Pike noted in 1989, although the font is now preserved in the Franciscan Friary, there is no certainty that this is where it originated. It passed through Kyteler's Inn before arriving at St Francis' Abbey, and what church it belonged to before that remains unknown. The object has, in other words, accumulated uncertainty at each stage of its recorded history.