Font (present location), Johnstown, Co. Meath

Twelve-sided, or dodecagonal, and dating to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, it was made for Kilcarn church, roughly 900 metres to the south-southeast, where it was recorded in situ by Isaac Butler around 1749. In 1853 it was packed off to Dublin for the Great Exhibition, and somewhere in the journey back it ended up here rather than home.

The font rewards close attention. Each of its twelve panels is shaped as an ogee-headed niche, a pointed arch with a gentle double curve that was characteristic of late Gothic decorative carving, and each is dressed with foliage, buttresses, and pinnacles. Eleven of the niches contain the apostles, all seated on benches and facing forward, though two of the twelve have been squeezed into a single panel. The twelfth panel steps away from the apostolic company altogether and shows the crowning of the Virgin by Christ. Several figures can be identified by the objects they carry: Peter holds his keys, Paul a sword, and Andrew bears a saltire cross. Most striking, perhaps, is St James, shown as a pilgrim with a satchel over his shoulder and a scallop shell in his hand, the shell being the traditional emblem of his great shrine at Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. Running beneath all of this, at the base of the columns that separate the niches, mythical beasts and human heads gnaw and grimace. The whole thing rests on a plain twelve-sided limestone pillar, bringing the total height to 0.87 metres.

The church also holds other displaced stonework worth noting. A second font, from Follistown, stands outside, and a pier from the cloister arcade of nearby Bective Abbey, a Cistercian foundation on the River Boyne, has been set into the outside of the church tower, making this a quietly dense gathering of medieval stonework in an otherwise unassuming parish setting.