It is roughly 0.3 metres wide, perforated through its centre, and carved on all four sides with roll moulding flanked by filleted keel moulding at the angles, a style of decorative stonework typical of medieval ecclesiastical craft. The working hypothesis among researchers is that it once formed part of a baptismal font, the basin used for administering baptism, associated with a church on this site dating to the thirteenth century.

The church itself, known in Irish as Teampall Inse, has a complicated paper trail. A document called the Papal Taxation List, compiled between 1302 and 1307 for the diocese of Ardfert, includes a reference to an 'Eccia de Inse', but scholars have disagreed about whether that entry refers to a church at Inch or to a foundation on the Great Blasket Island, several miles offshore. A separate entry in the same taxation, for a church recorded as 'Baliederscolle' in 987, has also been tentatively placed at Inch by the scholar Ó Conchir, writing in 1973. The uncertainty is characteristic of medieval Kerry ecclesiastical history, where place names shifted, Latin renderings were inconsistent, and island and mainland communities were closely linked. What does seem reasonably clear is that a thirteenth-century religious foundation existed here, and that this carved fragment in the graveyard is likely its most tangible survivor.

The font fragment sits among the graves that surround the church ruin. It is an easy thing to overlook, but the carved detailing repays a close look, particularly the way the moulding wraps all four sides of what is a comparatively small block of stone, suggesting it was once a worked piece of some refinement rather than a simple utilitarian object.