Font, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Religious Objects
Inside the ruined church of Teampall Bhaile Bhoithín, on the Dingle Peninsula, there survives a stone baptismal font in two parts, each perforated through its base, that together appear to form a nested arrangement of a kind rarely documented in such modest rural settings.
The smaller basin, roughly 25 centimetres across internally and equally deep, was almost certainly designed to sit within the larger, damaged outer basin, which measures some 38 centimetres in diameter. Both would originally have rested on a pedestal, now absent, making the whole assembly a portable or semi-portable object of some liturgical purpose, most likely the administration of baptism.
The church, known in Irish as Teampall Bhaile Bhoithín, sits centrally within a graveyard in the townland of Ballineanig Churchquarter, about one kilometre southeast of Ballyferriter village. The site was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, which first recorded the font fragments. When surveyors Karen Buckley and Laurence Dunne returned to the site in 2007, the interior of the ruined church had become so overgrown that the font pieces could not be located, though they noted this was likely a consequence of vegetation rather than loss or removal. The graveyard itself shows a clear spatial division, with older graves concentrated to the south of the ruin and more recent burials to the north, a pattern sometimes reflecting changing patterns of local devotion or land use around a site that had long since fallen out of active ecclesiastical use.
The church stands on the lower eastern slopes of Ballineanig Hill, set back roughly 200 metres from the Ventry to Ballyferriter road. Smerwick Harbour is visible to the north from the graveyard, and the mountain of Cruach Mhárthain lies to the west-southwest. Anyone hoping to see the font itself should be prepared for an overgrown interior, where the stone fragments, if they remain in situ, may require careful searching among the vegetation.