Font (present location), Blackcastle, Co. Meath

This kind of displacement is not unusual for early ecclesiastical stonework in Ireland; fonts, grave slabs, and carved fragments were frequently moved to places of active worship or safe keeping as older sites fell into disuse. What makes this particular piece worth noting is that its original home, the church at Dunmoe, was an entirely different religious and architectural context, and yet the font has continued its liturgical purpose in new surroundings.

The font itself is a plain octagonal form, 0.62 metres in external diameter and 0.38 metres high, with a circular, straight-sided basin measuring 0.46 metres across and 0.22 metres deep. Two receding mouldings run beneath the basin, a detail that gives the piece a modest architectural finish without any elaborate ornament. It was recorded at the church at Dunmoe by Helen Roe in 1968, by which point Dunmoe was already a ruin. At some point after that, the font was transferred to the Roman Catholic church of St. Oliver Plunkett in St. Mary's Park in Navan, where it remains. Octagonal fonts are a form with deep roots in Christian tradition, the eight sides carrying symbolic associations with resurrection and renewal, though whether that symbolism was foremost in the minds of the Dunmoe craftsmen is impossible to say.

The church of St. Oliver Plunkett in St. Mary's Park is the place to see the font today, should a visitor want to trace the object rather than the site listed in its original record. The ruins at Dunmoe, on the banks of the Boyne, survive separately and are worth visiting in their own right, but the font is no longer among them.