Ruin, Timoole, Co. Meath

The font that once served the church of St John at Timoole in County Meath did exactly that. It left the ruin long before anyone was paying close attention, relocated to the Roman Catholic church at Kentstown, around five kilometres to the west, shortly after that church was built in the nineteenth century. What remained at Timoole was a neglected subrectangular graveyard enclosed by masonry walls, a mortuary chapel rebuilt from the nave of the original church, and the low foundations of what is probably the chancel, oriented east to west in the manner typical of medieval church construction.

The land at Timoole had a long institutional history before any of this decay set in. Hugh de Lacy, the Anglo-Norman magnate who dominated Meath in the late twelfth century, granted it to the Augustinian house of Llanthony, a priory in Wales with a dependent house at Duleek. The association with Llanthony may explain why the church at Timoole appears to be absent from some of the earlier ecclesiastical lists. By 1622, the antiquary James Ussher was already describing both the church and chancel of Tymoole as ruined, and a later episcopal survey conducted by Dopping between 1682 and 1685 noted that the church of St John had been in disrepair since 1641. The font, however, survived all of this. It is octagonal, made of limestone with chamfered under-panels and a circular flat-bottomed basin, and it carries an inscription in English running around all sides below the rim. Spelled out in roman letters with the orthographic looseness of the period, it records that the font stone was built by one Robert Holywood, rector, in the year 1597. The font now sits on an octagonal sandstone base at Kentstown, a small object carrying a precise date and a personal name from a church that has otherwise left very little above ground.