Font, Pass Of Kilbride, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Religious Objects

Font, Pass Of Kilbride, Co. Westmeath

Cemented flush into the ground of a graveyard in County Westmeath, an old baptismal font sits in a slightly awkward state of preservation, neither properly displayed nor entirely forgotten.

The font, a square-shaped block carved from a single piece of stone with an inverted pyramidal base and a circular flat-bottomed bowl at its centre, measures 0.75 metres high and 0.53 metres wide. It has been defaced at some point in its history, the finer carved details no longer legible, and it was set into the graveyard surface, apparently when the church walls nearby were rebuilt in 1991. A font of this type would originally have held water for baptism, forming one of the central ritual objects of an early Christian or medieval parish church.

The site itself sits on a slight natural rise east of the Pass of Kilbride, giving open views across the gently rolling Westmeath countryside. What is striking about the location is how much history has accumulated in a relatively small area. The ruined church stands at the centre of the graveyard, St. Bridget's Well lies roughly 70 metres to the north, and a motte castle, the earthen mound raised by Anglo-Norman lords as a fortified stronghold, sits approximately 90 metres to the south-south-east. The font, now underfoot rather than upright, is a few metres south-east of a gap in the church's southern wall, which is presumably where an entrance once stood.

The font's current condition raises quiet questions about how objects like this get moved and reset during restoration work, and what is lost in the process. Visiting the graveyard gives access to all these elements in close proximity, and the cluster of well, church, font, and castle within such a compact area suggests the Pass of Kilbride held considerable local significance across several centuries of Irish history.

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