But this particular piece, with its irregular octagonal sides and a shallow bowl barely nine centimetres deep carved into its upper surface, has a quietly complicated history. It measures just 75 centimetres long and no more than 48 centimetres wide, and yet it appears to have survived centuries of burial, accidental rediscovery, and eventual rehousing before finding its current modest spot on the southern side of St. Martin's church at Garranes.

The font first came to scholarly notice in the early 1930s, when the archaeologist Seán P. Ó'Ríordáin encountered it during his survey of Kinalmeaky barony, a territorial division in south County Cork. When he found it, the font showed signs of having been recently dug up, and Ó'Ríordáin suspected it had been disturbed during the opening of a new grave in the surrounding churchyard. A baptismal font, typically a stone basin used for the administration of baptism, would once have been a fixture inside or immediately beside a church, which makes its burial in a graveyard all the more curious. A plaque placed beside it in later years records a local tradition that it originally belonged to Teampall Mairtin, an ancient church that was already described as being in ruins by 1615. It is possible the font predates the present church structure entirely, connecting it instead to that earlier ecclesiastical site. In the 1990s it was formally placed on a small concrete plinth to protect and display it.

The font sits close to the graveyard boundary fence, roughly ten metres from the south wall of the existing church. The plaque beside it is worth reading carefully; it carries the weight of several centuries of local memory compressed into a single sentence, and it raises questions about what else may still lie beneath the surrounding ground.