This particular font, originally from a church in Shanagolden Demesne in County Limerick, was described in the early twentieth century by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp as a "curiously fretted" object resting inside a nave flanked by four plain pointed arches on each side. That church is now gone. When surveyors working on the Urban Archaeological Survey of County Limerick examined the site in the late 1980s, they could not locate the font at all, at least not there.

The font had, in fact, moved. It is a compact, square-cut piece of limestone, measuring roughly 32 centimetres high and just over 33 centimetres wide, with a conical basin, the bowl-shaped hollow used for holding baptismal water, cut into its upper surface at around 24 centimetres in diameter. One of its faces is carved with a tracery pattern, four square panels each containing an eight-pointed star, a design that connects it to a comparable font found at Kilcooly Abbey in County Tipperary, suggesting a shared workshop tradition or pattern source. Researchers believe the font may have been designed to sit flush in a corner, with two decorated faces angled outward toward the congregation rather than one. The object was recorded in drawings made by the Cork antiquarian John Windele in the mid nineteenth century and later rendered by William Frazer, copies of which are held in the National Library of Ireland. Bradley and colleagues noted all of this in their 1989 survey, cross-referencing what they knew of the font's origins with its apparent disappearance from the Shanagolden site.

The font is now housed in the west porch of St. Mary's Church of Ireland in Askeaton, a town a short distance to the south-west along the River Deel. Askeaton itself has no shortage of medieval material to absorb a visitor's attention, including the remains of a Franciscan friary and a castle on a rocky island in the river, so the font is easily folded into a half-day in the area. St. Mary's is a working church, so access to the porch may depend on opening times. The font sits low and does not dominate its surroundings; it rewards a close look at the carved face, where the geometry of those eight-pointed stars has held its precision across several centuries.