Font (present location), Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Religious Objects
A small stone font now sits in Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, on the Dingle Peninsula, having been removed from its original home some distance away.
What makes it quietly puzzling is its construction: not one basin but two, each perforated at the base, and apparently designed to nest one inside the other, the whole assembly likely once resting on a pedestal. A baptismal font of this kind would have been used to hold water for the sacrament of baptism, and the concentric arrangement of basins, though unusual, suggests a deliberate liturgical design rather than an accident of survival.
The font originally belonged to Ballywiheen Church, known in Irish as Teampall Bhaile Bhoithín. The smaller of the two basins is roughly circular and flat-bottomed, 0.25 metres deep and up to 0.25 metres in diameter internally, with a perforation through its base. The second, larger basin shares the same basic form and is 0.38 metres in diameter, though it survives in damaged condition. The relationship between the two pieces was noted in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region compiled by J. Cuppage, which suggested the smaller basin was intended to sit within the larger, the pair forming a single functioning object. How and when the font was moved from Teampall Bhaile Bhoithín to its present location is not recorded, but the displacement is itself part of the story: ecclesiastical stonework on the Dingle Peninsula has frequently migrated over the centuries as older churches fell out of use or fell into ruin entirely.