The font now sits within St Audeon's Church on High Street, one of the oldest surviving parish churches in the city, and it carries a date, 1192, incised directly into the stone in Arabic numerals, making it among the earliest securely dated objects of its kind in Ireland.

The font itself is a substantial piece of Romanesque stonework. Square in plan with a central drum-shaped column beneath, its four sides are carved with semi-circular panels, each containing shell designs rendered in false relief, a technique in which decoration is carved to suggest depth without being fully three-dimensional, and finished with bead ornamentation running along the edges. The shell motif carried strong symbolic weight in early Christian tradition, associated with baptism and with pilgrimage, and its appearance here places the font firmly within the broader decorative vocabulary that Norman craftsmen brought to Ireland following the invasion of 1169. The year 1192 falls within the early decades of that settlement, when Dublin was being reshaped around its new Anglo-Norman parish structure.

St Audeon's is open to visitors, and the church itself rewards careful attention as one of the few medieval parish buildings in Dublin that still retains significant original fabric. The font is housed inside, so access depends on opening hours, which are worth confirming before making the trip. The church sits along the old city wall on High Street, close to the surviving Cornmarket gate, and the surrounding area still carries traces of the medieval street pattern. The incised date on the font is easy to miss if you are not looking for it, but once you know it is there, running your eye across that worn surface and finding those numerals is a quietly satisfying encounter with the very early medieval city.