Font, Tinhalla, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Religious Objects
Somewhere in the farmland of Tinhalla, a field still carries the name "Church field", though whatever building once stood there is long gone. What survives is a single circular sandstone font, the kind of basin in which water was blessed and held for baptism, now sitting not in any ecclesiastical setting but at a private house in the townland of Crehanagh South, roughly two kilometres to the west-southwest of where it was originally found.
The font is a substantial piece of stonework. It measures 0.84 metres in diameter and 0.36 metres in height, with a flat-bottomed basin cut into its upper face, 0.6 metres across and 0.2 metres deep. That it came from a "Church field" at the bottom of a north-facing slope, on the edge of the River Suir floodplain, suggests a now-vanished place of worship in this part of County Waterford, one that left behind little except its name on the land and this single carved object. Fonts of this type were central fixtures of early and medieval parish churches, and their survival, even displaced, often points to a site of considerable local religious significance that the documentary or physical record has otherwise swallowed up entirely.
The font is now held at a house in Crehanagh South, removed from its original agricultural setting. Its present location is private, and the field from which it came sits quietly in pasture with no obvious surface indication of what once occupied the ground nearby.