What is recorded here

Cleaners scraping grass from the Cooly graveyard in 2010 pulled back a buried stone marked with two small equal-armed crosses. The monastery, set on land sloping toward Lough Foyle, has been claimed for St. Patrick since local memory stretched back that far. What the crosses recorded is no longer written, but the act of carving them suggests somebody wanted death itself to keep a visible shape.

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 slab with two sunken small equal-armed crosses carved into the surface of the stone (H 0.18m; Wth. 0.48m). Only a small portion of this slab was visible protruding above the surface of the graveyard. Image DG021-008027-_01.jpg uploaded courtesy of Bernician Studies Group. Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 27 October 2015

Probably dating to the early medieval period, the cross-slab likely served a Christian commemorative or liturgical function, associated with the nearby ecclesiastical site. Such stones often carried religious symbols or inscriptions, reflecting the spread of Christianity in the region.

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