Shrine, Cool, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Shrine, Cool, Co. Kerry

At Cool in County Kerry, a small shrine sits close to the centre of its site, barely rising above the ground it occupies.

The mound, averaging just 0.4 metres in height, is a low, rectangular scatter of stones partially edged by upright slabs and scattered with quartz pebbles. What survives today is considerably less than what was once there, and that gap between past and present record is part of what makes the site quietly compelling.

When the Delaps visited and documented the shrine in 1910, they recorded four slotted stones still standing at its corners, along with a fifth placed just north of an adjacent ogham stone. Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches along the edge of a stone, and its presence here suggests the site carried some significance in the early Christian or late Iron Age period. Of all those slotted corner stones, only that fifth example, positioned near the ogham stone, remains visible today. It is a sandstone conglomerate with an off-centre broad notch measuring 0.18 metres long by 0.1 metres wide. Based on the illustration the Delaps made of the shrine, it appears to have been of the corner-post variety, a form in which upright stones at the four corners define the boundaries of a small sacred enclosure or monument. The loss of the other four stones, sometime between 1910 and more recent examination, leaves the structure fragmentary and harder to read in the landscape.

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