Font, Ballymore, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Religious Objects
In the graveyard at Ballymore, a small oval stone is slowly disappearing into the ground.
It measures roughly half a metre by thirty-five centimetres, stands just thirty-five centimetres high, and has a hollowed socket cut into its upper surface. It is officially catalogued as a font, the kind of stone basin used for baptisms, but there is a genuine possibility that it began life as something else entirely: a cross-base, the socketed plinth into which a standing cross would once have been fitted. That ambiguity, quietly preserved in the archaeological record, is part of what makes the object interesting.
The stone sits within a raised rectangular graveyard on the western edge of a slight north-to-south ridge at Ballymore in County Wexford. Raised graveyards of this kind are common in Ireland and typically indicate long, continuous use of a site, the ground level building up over centuries of burial. This particular enclosure is associated with the parish church of Screen, a medieval foundation whose remains also lie within the same boundary. The co-existence of a possible font and a possible cross-base in a single worn stone points to the kind of interpretive uncertainty that often surrounds early ecclesiastical objects in Ireland, where stones were reused, repurposed, and gradually absorbed into the landscape around them.