What is recorded here

Half-buried in the Cooly graveyard lies the cut head of an abandoned high cross, its quadrants hollowed but never joined, waiting beside twenty finished slabs. The monastery claimed Patrick himself as its founder on land sloping toward Lough Foyle, yet the incomplete stone suggests a craftsman stopped, left, or died before giving the crossing a body. What is missing is not a failed monument but an invitation to finish seeing what the chisel already revealed.

The early ecclesiastical site here consists of a sub-rectangular shaped graveyard inside of which are a number of earlier features. The monastery is located on excellent land sloping to Lough Foyle to the E and is traditionally claimed to have been founded by St. Patrick (Gwynn and Hadcock 1970, 399; Lacy et. al. 1983, 261). A magnetometer survey carried out by the Bernician Studies Group in 2014 in the fields surrounding the churches (DG021-008002-/003-) and graveyard (DG021-008001-) at Cooly revealed the outline of the ecclesiastical enclosure (DG021-008----) of the Early Christian monastery of Cooly (O'Brien and Adams 2014, 4). The graveyard was subject to a clean-up scheme in 2010 which resulted in the discovery of several unrecorded cross-slabs. The Bernician Studies Group carried out a survey inside the graveyard and recorded twenty cross slabs, 10 of which were ringed cross-inscribed slabs. One of these stones consists of the possible head (diam. 0.58m) of an unfinished high cross lying on the surface of the graveyard in the N quadrant close to the N boundary wall of the graveyard and immediately S of a cross-slab (DG021-008008-). The roughly circular shaped stone has a slightly domed shaped surface with hollowed out quadrants Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 27 October 2015

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