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| Piscina fragment in New Abbey Cemetery, Kilcullen, Co. Kildare. © Eugene Brennan |
Well, sort of!
I've always wondered what this stone object was in New Abbey Cemetery: a slab with a seemingly conical depression and a hole at the bottom. It's
located near the small entrance gate to the cemetery from the car park. I originally
thought it might have been part of a door jamb and decorative keeper for
a bolt. However, I came across a photo of a lavabo, or more correctly a piscina,
on an archaeological website and it appears the stone piece in New
Abbey may be the drain section of what remains of a piscina. This would have been a feature of the 15th-century Franciscan friary that was located in the vicinity of the cemetery. A lavabo is
an old term for a wash basin, and in an ecclesiastical context the basin was used by clergy for the ritual washing of hands before the consecration. A
piscina is a basin for washing communion vessels and the drain is known
as a sacrarium.
I queried it with Wexford archaeologist Colm Moriarty who runs the
Irish Archaeology website and Twitter/X account of the same name. He
confirmed my suspicion and agreed that it was more than likely part of a
piscina. What seems like a conical depression actually appears to be an
inverted pyramid, with an octagonal base and eight sloped faces. I'm guessing the reason for having flat, sloped faces and a pyramidal form was for practical reasons so the stonemason didn't have to spend lots of time creating the curved surface of an inverted cone. It's somewhat similar to the way image rendering (generating the texture and colour on objects) works in 3D CAD (computer aided design) applications; a cone and other shapes are made up of flat surfaces to speed up the rendering. Increasing the number of surfaces gives smoother results, but more computer processing power is required.
