Rathcoole

Nearest town:
Tallaght (6km ENE)
OS reference:
O027268
OS sheet:
50
Latitude:
53° 16' 53.71 N
Longitude:
6° 27' 36.21 W
Added to TMA by

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Image of Rathcoole (Holed Stone) by ryaner

The church is nondescript but the stone is great.

Image credit: ryaner
ryaner
ryaner Sep 13, 2014

Articles

Rathcoole

ryaner
ryaner Sep 13, 2014

Yet another Dublin curiosity, I’d never heard of this until I stumbled upon it here: irishstones.org/place.aspx?p=246 And what a nice surprise it is, nestled to the side of an, until recently, overgrown graveyard.

Rathcoole is supposedly named after this: themodernantiquarian.com/site/15924/newtown_lower.html the rath of Coole or Cumhaill, he of Fionn fame and is at the west edge of Dublin county.

I arrived and didn’t hold out much hope of getting to the stone as the walls of the church/graveyard are very high and the gate seemed forbidding. However, there was a groundsman there and I pushed through the gate no problem. I asked him if he knew of the stone and sure enough he led me to it. I asked if he knew much about it and he said he had heard that the tradition was to pass a newborn through the hole in a cleansing ritual, similar to baptism I guess.

The man was very friendly and showed me around the grounds – turns out that he’s a volunteer, doing the work to keep busy and doing a fine job, having cleared what was a seriously overgrown perimeter.

The stone, not even a metre square, sits there amongst the various relics of Christianity, a reminder of our pagan past, a survivor, pitted and pockmarked and tilting and still here, a small trace, or testament, to a tradition that remains despite all that time has altered.

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