In the graveyard at Prumpelstown, County Kildare, a piece of ecclesiastical stonework has ended up doing a job it was never made for. A circular granite font base, perforated through its body in the manner typical of early Irish stone carving, stands among the headstones not as a monument to any particular person but as one itself, repurposed to mark a grave.

A font base of this kind would originally have supported a baptismal font, the bowl-shaped vessel used for the sacrament of baptism, and the perforation was likely functional or decorative in its original liturgical context. How and when it was separated from whatever font it once held is unrecorded, as is the question of whose grave it now marks. That it ended up in this role at all suggests a long local history of making practical use of what was available, with no particular anxiety about the original purpose of the object. Granite is not the most common material for early medieval ecclesiastical stonework in Kildare, which makes the piece quietly notable even before its current function is considered.