Font, Commons, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Religious Objects
On a level patch of ground in Commons, County Wicklow, a granite font sits beside the last standing wall of a church that has otherwise almost entirely vanished.
The font, roughly 80 centimetres across and 40 centimetres high, is a baptismal basin, the vessel in which water was blessed and held for the sacrament of baptism, and its survival here feels quietly improbable given how little of the building around it remains.
The church itself is reduced to its east gable alone, the wall that would once have framed the altar end of the building. Whatever the structure looked like in full, whatever congregation gathered inside it, only this single upright remnant persists. The site sits on level ground but is positioned at the edge of a sharp drop to the south-west, which gives it an abrupt, slightly vertiginous quality, the ground simply falling away beyond it. The granite font rests beside that surviving gable, outdoors now, exposed to weather, no longer sheltered by any roof or wall on three of its four sides.

