Instead, it holds flowers. The bowl is round, flat-bottomed, and carved with vine leaf ornamentation, and it rests on a pedestal that was added later, the original base long since lost or separated from it. The combination of an ancient liturgical object repurposed as a planter, quietly occupying a church porch rather than a museum case or a heritage site, is the kind of small incongruity that rewards a careful look.

A font is the vessel used in Christian baptismal rites, typically a stone bowl designed to hold water for the sacrament. This particular example measures 0.44 metres in diameter and 0.34 metres in depth, modest enough in scale but notable for its decorative detail. The vine leaf carving places it within a long tradition of early Christian and medieval ecclesiastical stonework in Ireland, where plant motifs were commonly used to ornament sacred objects. The font is thought to have originated at Killossery, a townland a few kilometres to the northwest of Swords, which is recorded as the site of an early ecclesiastical enclosure. How it came to be moved from that site and eventually placed in its current location is not documented, but the displacement itself is not unusual; medieval stonework was frequently relocated, incorporated into later buildings, or simply carried off when original structures fell into ruin.

The church is in Swords Demesne, and the font sits in the porch at the north doorway, making it accessible to anyone who approaches from that side. It is an easy thing to walk past without registering its age or origins, particularly given that it is planted with flowers and reads at first glance as simple garden ornamentation. The vine leaf decoration on the exterior of the bowl is worth examining closely, as is the junction between the bowl itself and the later pedestal beneath it, where two different periods of the object's life visibly meet. There is no dramatic presentation, no interpretive panel, just a very old piece of stone doing something its makers almost certainly never intended.