What makes the leaning stone at Keeltrasna quietly singular is the local memory attached to it: that a priest once sheltered beneath its tilted bulk while being hunted down.

The stone stands in pasture on a south-east-facing slope above Bantry Bay, measuring roughly a metre wide, half a metre thick, and rising to about 1.6 metres in height. It is orientated on a north-east to south-west axis and leans noticeably to the south-east, which is what gives it the low, sheltering profile that makes the story feel at least plausible. The tradition places its use during the Penal Laws, the body of legislation active in Ireland roughly from the late seventeenth century into the early nineteenth, under which Catholic clergy were banned from practising openly and faced arrest or worse. Priests who continued to minister to their communities did so covertly, often in remote locations, and local landscapes across Ireland retain memories of priest-holes, Mass rocks, and hiding places from that period. The Keeltrasna stone, far older than any of that history, appears to have acquired a second life in the telling of it.