Font, Killulagh, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Religious Objects

Font, Killulagh, Co. Westmeath

A medieval baptismal font now sits in two pieces, separated by 240 metres and several centuries of ecclesiastical change.

The bowl rests in the grounds of St. John the Baptist's Roman Catholic Church in Killulagh, Co. Westmeath, placed on a cut stone of post-1700 date, while the octagonal shaft that once supported it remains inside the gateway of the old graveyard to the north-northwest. A font is the vessel used for baptism, typically a basin set on a pedestal, and this one was carved with some care: the bowl is octagonal, roughly 60 centimetres across, with a circular basin inside and a central drain hole. The underside is chamfered and finished with four bull-nosed chamfer stops, and the tooling on its flat panels matches that of the shaft left behind in the graveyard, confirming the two pieces were once a single object.

The graveyard itself is oval in plan, a shape commonly associated with early Christian enclosures in Ireland, and the site may preserve the footprint of a monastery founded by St. Lonán, whose feast day fell on the 12th of November. Little survives above ground of the medieval parish church that was dedicated to him: only the ivy-covered south-western gable remains, standing in the south-western quadrant of the enclosure. Just inside the gateway, alongside the fragment of the font shaft, there is also a bullaun stone, a roughly hollowed boulder of a type found at early Christian sites across Ireland, their original purpose debated but often associated with ritual use or grain processing. The combination of the oval enclosure, the bullaun, and the dedication to a named early saint suggests this quiet corner of Westmeath was a place of some significance long before the medieval church was built.

The font bowl lies to the east of the east gable of the nineteenth-century Catholic church, where a water stoup of uncertain age rests beside it. The matching tooling on shaft and bowl makes it possible to read the two fragments as a single object even across the distance that now separates them, and the graveyard gateway, with its stone stile, is where the shaft section can be seen close up.

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