Font, Inchanappa, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Religious Objects
In a small graveyard at Inchanappa in County Wicklow, among broken headstones, there lies a fragment of ecclesiastical furniture that gives the site its name: a broken rectangular font, the kind of stone basin used for baptism, now detached from any building or purpose and sitting amid the ruins of a church it once served.
It is the sort of object that tends to get overlooked, yet its presence here, catalogued and quietly noted by researchers across the decades, points to a place with more layered history than its modest footprint might suggest.
The church itself is poorly preserved, with the remnants of a nave and chancel arrangement measuring roughly nine metres by five and a half metres. This layout, a simple rectangular nave joined to a smaller chancel at the east end, was the standard form for early and medieval Irish parish churches, modest structures built for local communities rather than ecclesiastical display. The broken headstones in the surrounding graveyard were described in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928, which recorded local monuments and antiquities across Ireland in considerable detail during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The font itself was noted by Price in 1959, identified as rectangular in form and already broken by that point. Between those two sources, separated by three decades, the site appears largely unchanged, slowly wearing away in the Wicklow landscape.
