Font, Dunnaman, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Religious Objects

Font, Dunnaman, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in a grassy field in County Limerick, a small stone font was carefully measured and drawn in 1865, recorded for posterity in a scholarly volume, and then, at some point thereafter, quietly disappeared into the ivy.

It is still listed in the archaeological record, still assigned its reference number, still described with the precision of a Victorian antiquarian, but whether it remains physically present inside the ruined church walls is, as the record puts it with admirable frankness, uncertain.

The font belongs to a nave and chancel church, a simple two-part layout common to early and medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings, set within a graveyard in the southern part of the site. Local tradition held that the church was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, giving it the Irish name Teampull na Trionoid. The Earl of Dunraven, writing in his 1865 study of Irish antiquities, recorded the font still in situ inside the ruins and gave its dimensions with care: externally two feet square, with an internal depth of eight inches. It was quadrangular in form, and Dunraven included a drawn plate of it in his publication. The site sits in grassland roughly 370 metres northeast of Dunnaman Castle, which adds a further layer of medieval context to what is already a quietly layered landscape.

The ruins are described as ivy-covered, which gives some indication of what a visitor might encounter: a church absorbed by vegetation, its interior difficult to read and its smaller features easy to miss or impossible to access without pushing through growth. The font, if it survives at all, has not been located during more recent survey work compiled as recently as March 2019. Anyone with a serious interest in early ecclesiastical stonework might still find it worth the visit, if only to look carefully where others have not, though the honest expectation should be one of atmospheric ruin rather than a clearly visible object waiting to be admired.

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Pete F
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