The font now sits in St Mary's Church of Ireland in Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny, but its carving tells the story of a 19th-century intervention as much as a medieval one. When the Reverend J. Graves arranged for the font to be transferred from a disused parish church to Kilkenny Cathedral, stonemasons were already on site carrying out restoration work. Graves had them decorate the three bare sides of the bowl to match the single ornamented face that had survived from the Middle Ages. The result is a font that looks, at a glance, uniformly Romanesque, but is only a quarter genuinely so.

The font almost certainly originated at the parish church associated with Kells Priory, a few miles from Inistioge, before its removal in the 19th century and its eventual transfer to Inistioge. Carved from Dundry oolite, a fine-grained limestone quarried near Bristol and frequently imported to Ireland during the medieval period as a prestige building material, the font has a square, cushion-shaped bowl sitting on a circular stem and a square base. The stem is embellished with rope mouldings, though whether it is original to the bowl is uncertain. The bowl's inner surface was once lined with lead, and traces of hinges and a hasp show that it originally had a lockable cover, a practical measure to prevent the theft or misuse of consecrated water. Scholars have suggested the font was acquired for Kells in the late twelfth or, more probably, the thirteenth century, and that its presence may reflect a connection with William Marshal, the powerful Anglo-Norman magnate who held extensive lands in Leinster, or with his seneschal Geoffrey FitzRobert, either of whom may have gifted it to the church. The low-relief foliage carving on the original face, and the botanical motifs at the corners of the base, of which only one is considered original, point to a craftsman working in a well-resourced tradition. A 19th-century illustration recorded before Graves's intervention confirms that the stem at that point carried no rope moulding and only one side of the bowl was ornamented, lending some weight to the theory that the font had always been designed to sit flush into a corner.