Old Font, Ballintemple, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the fabric of a private house in Ballintemple, County Wicklow, there is a small stone bowl that once held holy water in a medieval church.
It is not in a museum, not behind a fence, and not marked on any interpretive panel. It sits built into the wall of the first floor of the Wolohan family home, a fragment of ecclesiastical life that somehow migrated from churchyard bank to domestic masonry over the course of a century or two.
The font originally belonged to the medieval church of Tachmayl, also known as Ballintemple, whose levelled remains still occupy the centre of a D-shaped graveyard nearby. A stoup, to give it its proper name, is a small stone basin fixed near the entrance of a church, used by worshippers to bless themselves with holy water on entering. This one is modest in scale, with a top diameter of just 0.2 metres and a depth of 0.12 metres. By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey was producing its first detailed six-inch maps of Ireland, the font had already left its original home inside the church and been incorporated into the enclosing bank of the graveyard, on the south side just east of the entrance. At some point after that it was removed again entirely. Writing in 1927, a researcher named Ronan noted that the holy water font was by then preserved in part at the home of Mr. Laurence Wolohan in Ballintemple, where it remains to this day.
The wider site around the graveyard rewards attention in its own right. The D-shaped enclosure is thought to follow the outline of an Early Christian ecclesiastical boundary, a form of sacred demarcation common across early medieval Ireland. Two stones within the graveyard carry prehistoric rock art. There is a holy well, known as Bride's Well, approximately 110 metres to the northwest. A cropmark in the field to the south marks the ghost of a levelled ringfort, visible from the air under the right conditions. The graveyard itself may also have served at some point as a cillin, the informal term for a burial ground used for unbaptised children, a practice once widespread in rural Ireland and still the subject of ongoing archaeological study.