At the western end of St. David's Church in Naas, a baptismal font sits on a modern five-legged pedestal, looking at first glance like a quietly functional piece of church furniture. Look more closely, and the stone itself begins to give the object away. It is cut from black fossiliferous limestone, a rock that preserves the compressed remains of ancient marine creatures within it, so that the material from which someone carved a Christian ritual vessel is itself full of the ghosts of far older life.

The font dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a period when the Anglo-Norman presence in Kildare was well established and parish churches were being fitted out with the permanent fixtures of organised religious life. It is square in plan, measuring roughly 74 centimetres long by 72 wide and 50 high, with a circular basin, straight-sided and just 20 centimetres in diameter, set into the top surface. A plugged drain-hole at the centre of the basin would once have allowed water to be drawn off after use, a practical detail that sits oddly with the solemnity of the object. The exterior faces are carved in false relief, a technique in which decoration is created by cutting away the background rather than building up raised forms, leaving different sprays of foliage across each surface. The result is restrained rather than showy, the kind of careful decorative work that suggests a craftsman working within a clear tradition.