Font, Herbertstown, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Religious Objects

Font, Herbertstown, Co. Kildare

A granite baptismal font sitting in the grounds of one church, having begun its life in another, is not an unusual story in Ireland. What makes this particular font quietly interesting is the precision with which it has been recorded against the near-total silence of its own history. The object is square in plan, roughly half a metre on each side, with a circular basin hollowed into its top surface and a small drain-hole at the centre. A moulded ring runs around the base, and the whole thing once sat on a circular column that has since disappeared. The granite is plain and functional, the kind of object that does its liturgical job without announcing itself.

The font originally belonged to Herbertstown Church in County Kildare, and at some point before 1990 local parishioners removed it and brought it to St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church at Two-Mile-House, a small settlement a few kilometres to the south. The reason for the move is not recorded, though the relocation of fonts, grave slabs, and other stonework by communities seeking to preserve or reclaim them is a recurring pattern across Ireland, particularly where older church buildings fell into ruin or changed hands over the centuries. The column on which the font once stood did not make the journey, or did not survive it, leaving the basin effectively stranded, separated from the architecture that would have given it its original meaning and proportion. A baptismal font is, in its simplest form, a vessel for holding the water used in the Christian rite of baptism, and the column beneath would have raised it to a practical working height within the church interior.

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