The font itself is square, measuring roughly half a metre across and not quite a third of a metre tall, with a circular basin cut into its upper surface and a small drainage hole at the centre. What makes it worth stopping at is the carving on its outer faces: the east side carries eight round-headed flutes, while the north and west faces are worked with Gothic tracery in the form of ribbed vault patterns, the kind of decorative geometry more usually seen overhead in the vaulting of a chancel roof. The north face adds a twisted column to the arrangement, giving it a slightly restless quality among the otherwise formal patterning.

Kilcooly Abbey is a Cistercian monastery in County Tipperary, founded in the twelfth century and substantially rebuilt after a raid in 1445. The font belongs to the fabric of this later building phase, when the decorated stonework throughout the abbey was given considerable attention. The pedestal on which the font now rests is reconstructed, assembled from material salvaged from elsewhere on the site: a chamfered double-column base with broach stops, the kind of shaped termination used where a chamfer meets a flat surface, taken from the cloister arcade. This repurposed base sits on a tapering limestone column, so the font effectively stands on architectural fragments from a different part of the building entirely. It is a quiet piece of post-Reformation improvisation, the sort of practical reassembly that happened across Irish monastic sites as their original functions dissolved and their fabric was rearranged or robbed out over centuries.