When water fills its octagonal limestone bowl, it drains not through the base but through a hole drilled into the forehead of a carved human face, so that the liquid runs down across the nose and cheeks. A reddish stain has spread from the corner of one eye down the side of the face, deepening the effect considerably. The local tradition holds that the face represents Christ wearing the Crown of Thorns, and the twisted band of moulding that runs around the bowl does continue across the sculpted forehead, lending some credibility to that reading.

The font is made from smooth, dark grey limestone and stands on a modern base. Seven of its eight panels are plain apart from the twisted decorative band running around the bowl's circumference; the eighth carries the face, which projects roughly four inches out from the surface in bold relief. The internal width of the bowl measures approximately 0.44 metres and the internal depth around 0.16 metres. The naïve, somewhat raw quality of the carving suggests it was made sometime in the 16th or 17th century, during the late medieval period. Writing in 1947, a scholar named Roe described the drain hole as giving the head a frightening appearance, a judgement that is difficult to argue with once you have read the description carefully. The combination of the perforation and the discolouration produces something that was presumably never intended to be devotionally comfortable, or perhaps was entirely intended to be exactly that.