Font (present location), Kilkenny, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Religious Objects
In a D-shaped thicket of thorn bushes and trees on poorly drained ground in Kilkenny, Co. Westmeath, a medieval limestone baptismal font lies on its side in the earth, its basin still collecting water and, apparently, coins.
The font is no longer inside any building. Nobody is entirely sure which building it came from. And yet people are still leaving offerings in it, as though the object itself, separated from its original context by some unknown sequence of events, retains whatever purpose the place around it once held.
The font is octagonal, cut from limestone, measuring roughly 64 centimetres across and 30 centimetres tall, with chamfered, or bevelled, panels around its exterior and a flat rim. Its circular basin is 46 centimetres in diameter and 26 centimetres deep, with a central drain hole that was obscured by water and vegetation when the site was examined. The hexagonal base of the font lies separately, a short distance to the west. One face of the base was left undressed, which suggests it originally stood flush against a wall, either of the medieval church located around 240 metres to the south-west, or of the nearby abbey that once belonged to the Fratres Cruciferi, a mendicant order also known as the Crouched Friars, whose levelled site lies roughly 260 metres to the south-south-west. A stone cross, possibly a finial from one of those same buildings, has been placed upright into a square socket cut into the upper surface of the base. The broader cluster of medieval and architectural fragments arranged around the perimeter of St. Canice's holy well, to which the font now effectively belongs, form a series of stations, the kind of circuit used in traditional devotional practice at Irish holy wells. The whole assembly sits in the shadow of Kilkenny Castle, roughly 330 metres to the west-south-west.
The site is heavily overgrown, with thorn bushes and dense vegetation making close inspection difficult. The coins left in both the font basin and the socket of the base are modern, suggesting that whatever the history of how these fragments arrived here, the practice of leaving offerings has continued, quietly, without any particular ceremony making the news.