Outside the entrance to a church in Prosperous, Co. Kildare, sits a baptismal font that does not quite belong there. It stands roughly 1.5 metres tall on an octagonal limestone column, topped by an octagonal basin measuring 64 centimetres across, with each of its eight faces about 46 centimetres wide. Carved into one of those faces is an angel, haloed, holding a shield across its stomach. The carving is deep but worn, which gives it the slightly uncertain quality of something that has spent a long time being looked at by weather rather than people.

According to the historian Comerford, writing in 1866, the font did not originate at Prosperous church at all. It came from a medieval parish church in Killybegs Demesne townland, roughly a mile to the south-east. That earlier church is long gone from the landscape in any meaningful sense, and the font appears to have been relocated at some point, carrying its carved angel with it. The angel-with-shield motif is not unique to this piece; similar imagery appears on fonts in County Meath, at Dunsany and Rathmore, which the scholar Helen Roe dated to the mid and late fifteenth century. The Kildare font, given the same decorative vocabulary, likely belongs to the same broad period, placing its carving somewhere in the later medieval centuries when such imagery was in circulation across the region.

The font now stands in the open air at the church entrance, which means the carving is visible to anyone who passes. The angel's features are worn enough to require some patience, but the shield across the stomach is the clearest element and the best place to start looking.