Salle-les-Alpes No. 6

On-site notes: if it were not for the shield that adorns one of the sides of this object, charged with four circles and a shell, we would have been totally convinced we had come across an "oil font", one of those pre-Romanesque baptismal fonts in the Val d'Aran later converted to reservoirs for the lamp oil gathered as tithe in the churches of that Pyrinean valley. Those Val d'Aran fonts have been dated to the 10th and 11th century; this object resembles them remarkably, but the presence of a coat of arms immediately adds a few hundred years to the dating, even though, as M. l'abbé pointed out during our visit, the old church was consecrated in 1138, a tempting proposition. It was apparently found embeded in an old church wall during construction. We found it re-used as a flower pot full of bright-red geraniums. [Puzzling case? We hope we shall come across some documentation on this object eventually. Perhaps the coat of arms may render some heraldic context]. [NB: a vessel not unlike the ones found in Vielha, in the Spanish Pyrenees [cf. Index entry for Vielha No. 2], or another such listed for the early church of St. Linga, in Kirk Marown, on the Isle of Man]