Modest in size, roughly oval in plan and less than a quarter of a metre deep, it has a central draining hole and dimensions that suggest it was made to be handled and moved rather than fixed in place. That portability turned out to matter.

The font originally belonged to Killinure Roman Catholic church, but during the Penal era, when laws restricting Catholic worship pushed religious practice out of formal buildings and into the landscape, it was relocated to a site known as Burke's Cross. There, according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, Mass was celebrated in the open air. Burke's Cross was one of countless such spots across Ireland where communities gathered around a Mass rock or roadside cross to observe the sacraments beyond the reach, or at least beyond the walls, of official scrutiny. That the font travelled with the congregation, rather than remaining behind in a building that may have been suppressed or abandoned, says something about how essential the ritual objects of parish life were considered. Neither the 1841 nor the 1909 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps record it, which is itself a small curiosity, suggesting it occupied an informal or overlooked position in the landscape even by the nineteenth century.