The site at Meentinny is believed to be a mass-rock, a term for the outdoor locations where Catholic priests secretly celebrated Mass during the Penal Laws, the series of eighteenth-century statutes that banned Catholic worship and placed a price on the heads of clergy. The practice of using a flat stone or natural feature in a remote spot was born of necessity, and places associated with it tend to carry a particular kind of quiet weight.

The hillock appears on the 1936 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with hachures indicating a mound, though it is understood to be a natural rather than man-made feature. Its Irish name, almost certainly Cnocán na bPaidreacha, translates as the little hill of the prayers, which is suggestive in itself. McCarthy, writing in 1991, described it as sited in a lonely glen, a cone-shaped mound where rosary beads had been found some years earlier. The discovery of those beads, small objects easily pocketed or lost, connects the abstract history of religious persecution to something tangible and personal. Bowman had already noted in 1934 that local tradition firmly associated the site with Mass celebrated during the Penal Times, which suggests the memory of its use had been passed down continuously through the community for generations.