The font at Maddockstown is an exception, and a carefully reassembled one at that. It sits just inside the entrance to the graveyard associated with the medieval church here, and what you see today is partly original stonework and partly the skilled reconstruction of a twentieth-century monumental sculptor working from fragments.

When the font was first recorded by Robertson in 1894, it had already been broken into two roughly equal halves. By the time the graveyard was tidied around 1950 and the object rediscovered, the situation was considerably worse: the bowl survived, though in many pieces, but only half the base remained and none of the supporting pillars at all. The Kilkenny Archaeological Society commissioned its restoration, and the work was carried out by Tom MacDonald, who rebuilt the central pedestal, the pillars, and the missing half of the base. What emerged from that process is a font square in plan, roughly 71 centimetres across and 35 centimetres high, with a circular basin and a drain-hole at its centre. All four sides carry Gothic flutes, two of the upper corners have carved heads in relief, and the top surface is decorated with incised intertwined vine leaves. The base, where original stone survives, bears four raised concentric circular mouldings. The whole assembly now rests on a concrete plinth. Scholars have placed it within a regional grouping known as the Ossory type, a category of medieval ecclesiastical stonework associated with the old diocese of Ossory in what is now County Kilkenny, and it has been tentatively dated to the late thirteenth century.