Font, Delgany, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Religious Objects

Font, Delgany, Co. Wicklow

Outside the doorway of a church in Delgany, County Wicklow, there is a font that has been quietly repurposed into a piece of low boundary wall.

Turned on its side, its drain-hole sitting just off centre, it reads at first glance as nothing more than a stone block. Only on closer inspection does the sub-rectangular form and the deliberate hollow reveal what it once was, an object made to hold water for a ritual purpose, now doing the rather more modest work of marking a boundary on the western side of the entrance.

Fonts like this one were used in Christian worship for the administration of baptism, and in medieval and early modern churches they were often carved from a single piece of stone. At some point, this example was removed from its original function and incorporated into the church's fabric in a very different way. The precise circumstances of its repositioning are not recorded, but the practice of reusing older ecclesiastical stonework in walls and structures was far from unusual in Ireland, where materials were rarely wasted and building phases at a given site could span many centuries. What makes this particular case quietly odd is that it was placed not inside a later structure, obscured and forgotten, but right beside the church door, visible to anyone entering, yet easy to pass without a second glance.

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Pete F
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