Font, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Religious Objects
Thomastown, on the River Nore in County Kilkenny, is a town that rewards slow attention.
Among its recorded archaeological monuments is a feature known simply as a font, a designation that typically refers to a stone basin used for holding holy water, most commonly associated with a church or ecclesiastical site. Such objects are easily overlooked: they tend to survive as fragments, moved from their original setting, repurposed as garden ornaments or cattle troughs, or left in the shadow of more conspicuous ruins. The plain label tells you just enough to know something is there, and very little else.
Thomastown itself has a layered medieval past. It was founded in the thirteenth century by Thomas FitzAnthony, a Welsh settler from whom the town takes its name, and it grew into a walled merchant town of some importance during the later medieval period. The ruins of Grennan Castle and the substantial remains of St Mary's Church speak to that period of activity. A font associated with such a place might plausibly belong to the parish church tradition of the region, where decorated Romanesque or Gothic stonework occasionally survives in unexpected corners, but without more specific detail about this particular object, its age, condition, or current location, that remains speculation rather than fact.
What can be said with reasonable confidence is that fonts of this kind are worth pausing over when encountered. They are among the more intimate survivals of medieval devotional life, worn smooth by centuries of use, and frequently the only remaining trace of a church or chapel that has otherwise vanished entirely from the landscape.