What is recorded here

Cooly holds a graveyard where St. Patrick is said to have planted a monastery beside Lough Foyle. A discarded L-shaped slab still stands inside, perhaps rejected by a stonemason for lacking a finished cross. The rejected stone becomes a marker of human limitation, preserving the moment when perfection resisted the chisel.

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 identified a freestanding rough L-shaped slab (H 0.4m; T 0.07m) of uncertain date standing inside Cooly graveyard. This slab may have been an unfinished ringed-cross slab which was discarded by the stonemason. It is similar in shape to the nearby partially carved ringed cross-slab (DG021-008013-) and an unfinished slab (DG021-008022-). Image DG021-008023-_01.jpg uploaded courtesy of Bernician Studies Group. Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 27 October 2015

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