Font (present location), Ballynabinnia, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Religious Objects
Outside the west door of St. Joseph's Roman Catholic church in Kilnamona, County Clare, there sits a baptismal font that has led a quietly complicated afterlife.
Its limestone bowl, roughly oval in plan and just under half a metre tall, was moved here around 1932 from a medieval church that once stood some 250 metres to the south-west. Inside the bowl, sand has been packed to support a modern ceramic vessel of holy water, so the object now functions as a kind of layered artefact: medieval stone serving a contemporary devotional purpose, the old bowl pressed into new service without ever quite being hidden.
The font's origins lie with the ruins of that earlier Kilnamona church, a medieval structure whose own history stretches back well before the present Catholic parish came into being. The bowl itself is irregularly carved, with four rounded protrusions on the exterior that form something like corners on what is otherwise a curved form. The interior slopes inward towards the base, and there are no decorative carvings visible on the outer surface. What it does carry is a considerable coating of lichen, the slow accumulation of years spent outdoors, and a crack on its north face through which a trickle of water seeps. That detail is easy to miss, but it gives the stone a faintly animate quality. The font now rests on a modern concrete shaft and base, a functional if unremarkable plinth that makes no pretence of matching the age of what it supports.