By the time it was recorded in detail in the 1990s, it was lying in rubble to the left of the altar, separated from any shaft or base, its origins as a narrow free-standing font legible only from what remained of its sub-pyramidal upper section. One corner had broken away, but enough survived to make clear that this was no ordinary piece of ecclesiastical stonework. The bowl's interior is rectangular, which sets it apart immediately; holy water font bowls of this period tend to be circular, occasionally square, and only very rarely faceted or otherwise irregular in shape.

What draws the eye most, though, is the carving on the exterior. A grotesque head, its neck extended and its facial features deliberately exaggerated, projects in high relief from the stone. Around the neck there is what appears to be a loose folded garment, adding a curiously specific detail to what might otherwise read simply as decorative menace. The rest of the surface is covered in small, precise pocking, a form of tooling produced by repeated careful strikes with a pointed instrument, which specialists associate with work carried out in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. When John O'Donovan and Eugene Curry passed through during the Ordnance Survey of 1839, they noted the font briefly but memorably, calling it one of "curious formation." It was Jaqueline Higgins, writing in 1994, who gave it the fuller description it deserved, situating it within a broader discussion of medieval sculpture at Carran and its wider significance for understanding the region's craft traditions during the late medieval period.