What is recorded here

Coolnakilly means recess, cell or church, and the land still keeps that shape. A round stone with a sunk basin stands where water may have touched new life, while faint grave marks and a lost wooden cross suggest worship continued long before records arrived. The place does not need a grand story because its own stones repeat the same thing: people came here, marked death, and left the earth remembering them.

According to the OS letters of 1838-40 ‘There is a large roundish rock (WI024-016---) in the townland of Coolnakill twenty one feet in circumference and about eighteen inches in height, having an oval bason sunk in the top towards the south side, measuring nineteen inches one way, fifteen the other and ten inches in depth. They call it the Holy Stone, but have no tradition relative to it. There are some remains of buildings or graves in its immediate vicinity, from which we may infer that a church (WI024-016001-) had been here in former times, of which the bason (WI024-016001-) in this stone was the baptismal or holy water font. About a furlong southwest of the holy stone they shew of bush, in which stood a wooden cross till within the last two years. These circumstances together with the name of the townland, which means Recess or Cell or Church, sufficiently establish the existence here of some ecclesiastical building in days of old’ (O’Flanagan 1928, 119). Date of upload: 19 October 2012

A Neolithic stone basin tomb; significant as a rare example of a prehistoric ritual or funerary monument featuring a carved basin.

The monument record does not grant public access. Check the route and ask the landowner before entering private land.