In the south doorway of the old parish church at Lyons, County Kildare, a piece of ecclesiastical stonework has spent an unknown stretch of time doing a job it was never designed for. What was once a baptismal font base has been turned on its side and built into the western jamb of the doorway, repurposed as ordinary building material. It sits there now, quietly anomalous, embedded in the fabric of a wall.

The object itself is a small, square, perforated font base, roughly sixty centimetres in both width and height. On what would originally have been its upper face, a slightly raised roundel, about forty centimetres in diameter, served as a tenon, the projecting part that would have seated and located the font bowl above it. A central perforation runs through the stone, just under a centimetre across, which would have allowed water to drain away during baptisms. At some point, this functional liturgical object was stripped of its original role and pressed into service as a building stone, rotated ninety degrees and mortared into the doorway. Whether the font bowl was lost before the base was reused, or whether both were separated during some later alteration or clearance of the church, is not recorded. The church itself at Lyons is a medieval foundation, and the recycling of carved or dressed stonework within old Irish churches was not unusual; earlier fabric was frequently absorbed into later repairs and rebuilding without ceremony or record.