What is recorded here

Twenty cross-slabs stand in the Cooly graveyard, ten wearing rings, though a hurried cleanup in 2010 first pulled them from the soil. One split stone keeps a faint ring and an unfinished cross, suggesting a carver may have abandoned the work or time erased the prayer. The monastery slopes toward Lough Foyle, carrying a traditional claim of St. Patrick and a quiet danger of forgetting what its people marked.

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 slabs. One of these stones was described by the Bernician Studies Group as following ‘A coarse-grained laminated stone standing vertically, max. height above the ground surface is 330mm, width 280mm, thickness 150mm. The left (N) side is near-vertical towards the bottom, but the upper part of that side and the top have been broken off. The right (S) side is cut to a straight edge, chamfered. Both E and W faces are fairly smooth. The whole stone has been split right through, top to bottom, and the left side had flaked off. The W face bears faint traces of a ring-headed cross. This is either very heavily eroded or it was never completed and what we see are the faint first markings-out of the shape. The left edge, near the top, describes an arc of a circle of approx. 200mm diameter, possibly the outer edge of a ring part of whose lower right quadrant can be traced, with the ring width of some 30mm’. Sketch drawing of possible ringed cross slab (DG021-008028-_01) uploaded courtesy of Bernician Studies Group. Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 28 October 2015

Dateable to the early medieval period, likely between the 7th and 10th centuries, the cross-slab in Cooly would have served a Christian commemorative or liturgical function, possibly marking a burial or as part of monastic architecture. Such stones often carried religious iconography and may have been associated with local saints or important figures connected to the early monastery.

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