Font, Castletimon, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Religious Objects
Somebody took considerable care drilling a hole through a block of granite.
The hole begins at 4cm wide inside the basin, narrows to just 1cm through the body of the stone, then opens out again to 5cm where it exits. That kind of precision, worked into coarse-grained rock without modern tools, suggests this object mattered enough to get right. The object in question is a font, a basin carved into the top of a cylindrical granite block, of the type once used for holding blessed water in an ecclesiastical setting. The block itself is 80cm across, the basin sub-rectangular and steep-sided, measuring roughly 48cm by 45cm at the top and tapering slightly toward the base, with a depth of 18cm. The rim around the basin is roughly flat but has taken some damage along one edge, and the base of the block is uneven, causing it to lean slightly toward the side where that carefully engineered drain hole sits, angled at approximately 45 degrees.
The font originated at Castletimon in County Wicklow, though it no longer sits there. At some point it was moved to the graveyard of St. Mary's Church at Barrindarrig, a relocation that is not unusual for early ecclesiastical stonework in Ireland, where objects associated with abandoned or ruined religious sites were often gathered into still-active churchyards for safekeeping or continued veneration. The granite from which it is made is consistent with the geology of the Wicklow uplands, a region with a long tradition of working the local stone, though coarse-grained granite of this kind is not the easiest material to shape with any subtlety. The care taken with the drain hole, in particular, points to a maker who understood both the liturgical function of the object and the practical problem of keeping standing water clean.