Cross (present location), Cool, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross (present location), Cool, Co. Kerry

On a low rise at the north-western tip of Valentia Island, overlooking the bog-covered Emlagh Basin, there is a stone cross that nobody marked on a map.

The Ordnance Survey ignored it, and the site sits quietly at the edge of what is otherwise well-documented Atlantic coast terrain. The cross itself still stands upright, but its two companion pillar stones have fallen; they now lie prostrate in the grass and loose stone beside it, the arrangement the early twentieth-century scholar T. J. Westropp recorded as a rough north-south line having long since collapsed into something more scattered and ambiguous.

The cross is 1.64 metres long, tapering gently toward a straight-edged top, with short rectangular arms that reach a maximum width of 0.53 metres. Where the shaft meets the arms, the angles are slightly hollowed, a detail easy to miss until you look closely. Both faces carry the same decoration: a diagonally disposed linear cross with its upper and lower angles closed, giving each face a quiet, geometric precision. The two pillar stones once stood in measured succession to the south, at 0.91 metres and 2.1 metres high respectively, their spacing documented by Westropp in 1912. Máire Delap, writing a year earlier in 1911, noted that all three stones had only recently been raised to the positions in which she found them, which raises the unsettling possibility that what looks like an ancient arrangement is partly a Victorian or Edwardian reconstruction. Legend, meanwhile, attaches the site to St Brendan, the sixth-century navigator-saint associated with the wider Iveragh peninsula; the two pillar stones were said to mark the graves of men he baptised here. A bronze sword found near this location in the nineteenth century, recorded by the National Museum of Ireland in 1893, adds an earlier and stranger layer still, suggesting the ground had significance long before any Christian memorial was raised on it.

The site affords wide views of the Atlantic and of the Blasket Islands to the north-west, and the larger fallen pillar, measuring 2.9 metres in length, can be found lying 2.5 metres to the west of the cross in a heap of loose stone. A short row of low upright stones, about 2 metres in total length, runs just to the east of the cross, easy to step over without noticing what they are.

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Pete F
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