Or so local tradition holds. When surveyors went looking, they found the field boundary entirely swallowed by gorse, briars, and hawthorn, the corner heaped with clearance rubble, and the mass-rock itself nowhere to be found. It is, in other words, a monument that has been recorded precisely because it could not be recorded.

Mass-rocks are flat or near-flat slabs of stone, sometimes cross-inscribed, that served as improvised altars during the Penal era, the period following the Williamite Wars when Catholic worship was suppressed under a series of laws enacted from the late seventeenth century onward. With churches closed or destroyed and priests subject to fines, imprisonment, and worse, congregations gathered outdoors, often in remote or sheltered spots, using a suitable stone as a makeshift altar surface. The cross carved into the Farlistown stone, if it is indeed there, would be consistent with that practice, a simple act of consecration on an otherwise unremarkable piece of rock. Many such sites survive across Ireland, though the line between a genuine Penal-era gathering place and a stone that later acquired the association through folk memory is not always easy to draw.

The practical situation at Farlistown is frankly discouraging for anyone hoping to verify the stone's existence. The field corner where it supposedly sits against the north side of the roadside boundary is obscured by dense scrub, with rubble piled against it for good measure. There is something quietly apt about this: a site historically defined by concealment, still concealed.