It was made for the abbey of Fertagh, roughly three kilometres to the north-north-east, and at some point in its history it was moved to its present home, carrying with it an unusually elaborate programme of medieval decoration that most visitors to the church probably pass without a second glance.

The font is modest in scale, no more than 0.4 metres across at its widest, but the craftsmanship repays close attention. Though circular in its bowl, the exterior is cut into sixteen sides, each forming a distinct rectangular panel dressed with punch tooling and carved in raised relief. The sequence of imagery that runs around those panels is strikingly varied: a cross, pointed Gothic windows with switch-line tracery (the branching geometric patterns characteristic of later medieval stonework), a six-petalled flower, ivy leaves with intertwining stems, a human head, interlace patterns, concentric circles, and one panel whose central motif, possibly a sun or crown of thorns, has been partially obscured by the later insertion of a hook for a font lid. That small act of practical adaptation hints at a long working life. The bowl itself tapers downward through sixteen chamfered panels to meet the pedestal, though the pedestal is not the original one. Inside the bowl, a lead lining, three centimetres thick, preserves the form of the vessel that would once have held baptismal water. The font was discussed in detail by Pike in 1989, and it stands as one of the more carefully documented examples of medieval ecclesiastical stonework to survive in County Kilkenny, its imagery a compressed catalogue of motifs that medieval carvers drew on across Ireland and further afield.