What is recorded here

The bowl may have ground pepper for Herbertstown Castle or held holy water for a priest, depending on which hunger it answered. Parishioners carried it from the old church into the Two-Mile-House graveyard before 1990, giving it a second life beside the people who still walked past it. Its size and missing drainage hole refuse easy judgement, leaving it neither fully sacred nor fully domestic.

A large bowl shaped stone (ext. diam. 0.64m; rim T 0.1m; H 0.36m) with circular basin (top diam. 0.44m; base diam. 0.17m; D 0.21m) and no drainage hole may represent the remains of an early medieval font. It is too large to represent the remains of a medieval water stoup and not the right shape for a bullaun stone. It is possible that this plain unperforated bowl shaped stone was used as a medieval mortar rather than as a baptismal font and may have belonged to the adjoining Herbertstown Castle or was used for domestic purposes of the residential priest at Herbertstown Church. Such a function has been suggested for several large undecorated bowls which lacked a central drainage hole (Roe 1968, 12). The stone was removed from Herbertstown Church (KD023-018----) some time before 1990 by local parishioners and placed in the graveyard of St. Peter’s R. C. Church, Two-Mile-House (Gibson 1990, 60). Cross-referenced with KD023-018004-. A later medieval square-shaped font (KD024-066----) also taken from Herbertstown Church lies a few metres to the W. Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien based on details provided by William Gibson Date of upload: 23 April 2019

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