Font, Kilnamona, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Religious Objects
In the townland of Kilnamona in County Clare, there is a place that holds significance not for what remains there, but for what was taken away.
The original location of a stone font, the kind of basin used for holding holy water at baptisms, once occupied a spot that is now effectively defined by an absence. The font itself still exists, but it has not stood in its original position for nearly a century.
Around 1932, the font was removed from its earlier site and relocated to the modern Catholic church in Kilnamona, where it can still be found today. The move was likely part of the broader pattern of consolidation common to rural Irish parishes during the early twentieth century, when older ecclesiastical objects were frequently gathered into newer, more centralised church buildings. What that earlier site looked like, whether it was a ruined chapel, an outdoor enclosure, or something else entirely, is not recorded in what survives about this particular object. The font's original home is now a place remembered only in the record of its displacement.