It surfaced during a graveyard clean-up at the site of the medieval church of Newtown Earley, buried among the accumulated debris of a churchyard that had long since fallen out of regular use. What emerged from the ground was not the font's basin but its pedestal, the supporting column below, decorated on three of its broader faces with seated figures carved in relief, each one gowned and robed, right hand raised in the gesture of blessing. Their hair is rendered in stylised curls, they sit on armed chairs, and the details between them vary in small but deliberate ways: one rests his left hand on his knee, another holds a book, a third has what may be two objects hanging from his neck or possibly openings worked into the robe itself. Beneath the arm of that third chair, a flat circular form survives, worn but legible.

The pedestal was drawn in 1840 by the Reverend James Graves, an antiquarian with a particular interest in Kilkenny's medieval fabric. When R. Harte examined and described the object for the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987, he found that comparing Graves's drawing with the physical piece showed very little change across nearly a century and a half, a quiet indication of how durable the sandstone carving had proved, and perhaps of how undisturbed the graveyard had remained. By 2005, however, when the site was discussed in the context of the broader manor of Earlstown, the pedestal's whereabouts had already become uncertain. Its current location remains unknown.