Font (present location), Dawros, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Religious Objects
A baptismal font, the vessel used to hold water for the Christian rite of baptism, would normally be found inside a church, positioned near the entrance as a reminder that baptism marks the threshold of the faith.
The one at Dawros, in south-west Kerry, now sits outdoors on the church lawn, propped on three stone slabs roughly twenty metres east of the building. It is an understated object, a plain sandstone basin, subrectangular in shape with rounded corners and a flat rim, measuring 77 centimetres by 54 centimetres and only about 25 centimetres high. The walls are 10 centimetres thick, and the basin itself, where the water would have rested, is a shallow 13 centimetres deep. Nothing about its appearance announces great age or ceremony. It is simply a functional object, now quietly weathering in the open air.
At some point the font was moved from the chancel, the area around the altar at the east end of the church, where it had previously been kept. How it came to be placed in the chancel in the first place is itself somewhat irregular, as fonts are more conventionally found near the entrance to a church. Where the font originally stood before that, and when it was made, are questions that cannot now be answered with any certainty. Its original location could not be established. Whether it was made for this church or arrived from somewhere else entirely, whether it was moved indoors for protection at some earlier point or simply installed there, none of this is recorded. What remains is the object itself, sitting on its three stones on the grass, its plain sandstone surface making no particular claim on the attention of anyone passing by.