Anomalous stone group, Ballybrit, Co. Galway

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Ballybrit, Co. Galway

Beneath the turf of Ballybrit Racecourse, one of the most recognisable sporting venues in Ireland, there once stood a pair of stones that carried a quietly loaded significance.

The site is now entirely gone, removed at some point in the 1960s or early 1970s, and no surface trace remains. What made it worth noting was not its size or grandeur but its tradition: the stones, one upright and one prostrate, were locally remembered as a mass-rock.

Mass-rocks are a particular kind of outdoor altar, typically a flat or prominent stone at which Catholic priests celebrated Mass in secret during the Penal era, roughly the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when Catholic worship was suppressed under British law. They tend to be found in remote or sheltered spots, chosen precisely because they were difficult to observe. A pair of stones on open flat pastureland is an unusual configuration for such a site, which may partly explain the classification here as an "anomalous stone group" rather than a confirmed mass-rock. The tradition was recorded and filed with the topographical collections at University College Galway, and the earliest published reference dates to 1918. Whatever the stones originally were, the local memory attached to them was specific enough to be preserved in writing, even if the stones themselves were not preserved in the ground.

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