Outside the north door of St John's Church in Kill, a small limestone font sits in the open air, quietly out of place. Baptismal fonts are usually found inside churches, protected from the elements and positioned near the entrance as a symbolic threshold between the secular world and the sacred one. This one, however, is simply outside, square-bodied and undecorated, with a circular basin cut into its upper face. Its plainness is striking, a deliberate absence of ornament at a time when such objects were often carved with religious imagery or heraldic detail.

The font is a compact, workmanlike object: roughly half a metre on each side and just under forty centimetres tall, with a basin measuring approximately forty-two centimetres across and twenty-seven centimetres deep. It is cut from limestone, the most common building and carving material in the Irish midlands, and its straight-sided basin suggests a confident, functional approach to the craft rather than decorative ambition. Scholars have dated it to possibly the sixteenth century, a period in Ireland of considerable religious upheaval following the Reformation, when the status and use of such liturgical objects was contested and their survival was sometimes a matter of circumstance as much as intent.