Font, Reisk, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Religious Objects
Just inside the gate of a rectangular graveyard in the Ballymoat stream valley, a stone font sits in the open air, detached from any obvious shelter or liturgical context. It is a circular basin cut from conglomerate, a sedimentary rock composed of rounded fragments cemented together, and it measures roughly sixty centimetres across on the outside with a depth of fifteen centimetres. Four projecting lugs, the small knobs used to grip or mount a font, are spaced around its rim. That it survives at all, let alone in something close to its original condition, is quietly remarkable for an object that would once have stood inside a church.
The graveyard enclosure itself is defined by a stone-faced earthen bank, a construction method common in early Irish ecclesiastical sites where a raised boundary served both practical and symbolic purposes, marking sacred ground from the land around it. The ruined parish church of Reisk occupies the same enclosure, set on a broad low hill above the valley. The Reverend P. Power recorded the site in his survey of Waterford's ancient ruined churches, published in the Waterford Archaeological Journal in 1895, and his description remains one of the few detailed accounts of what can be found here. The font's material, conglomerate, is not the most common choice for ecclesiastical stonework, and its relatively modest dimensions suggest a rural parish church rather than any major foundation.