Font, Railstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Religious Objects
In Railstown graveyard in County Tipperary, set into the ground just outside the north wall of a ruined church, sits a font that is easy to overlook and difficult to date.
It is not carved with any ornament or inscription. It is simply a rough limestone boulder, worked just enough to serve a purpose, and left largely as nature made it.
The object measures roughly 0.68 metres by 0.75 metres at its base and rises about 0.6 metres above the ground. What makes it a font, in the ecclesiastical sense, is the deep oval bowl hollowed into its top, tapering from a wide opening of around 0.38 by 0.41 metres down to a narrow base of 0.12 by 0.15 metres, and descending fully 0.5 metres into the stone. A font of this kind would have held water for baptism, the stone vessel serving a sacramental function even in the most modest of church settings. One face of the boulder has been cut flat, which suggests it was not always sitting freely in the ground; the straight edge was almost certainly shaped so that the stone could sit flush against a wall, probably inside the church itself. At some point it was moved, or the building around it fell away, and it ended up where it is now, embedded in the earth a metre from the chancel's north wall and just east of the nave's north-east corner. That precise positioning, neither random nor formally marked, gives a sense of something carefully placed rather than simply abandoned.