Mass-rock, Caheraphuca, Co. Clare

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Holy Sites & Wells

Mass-rock, Caheraphuca, Co. Clare

In the townland of Caheraphuca, on the Clare side of the old road between Gort and Crusheen, there may once have stood a mass-rock, a flat-topped stone used as a makeshift altar during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was prohibited and priests celebrated Mass in secret on open hillsides, in bog hollows, and beside inconspicuous outcrops far from official scrutiny.

The qualifier matters here: the site was recorded as a possibility, not a certainty, and that uncertainty is itself part of the story.

What was identified is a heavily overgrown block of limestone outcrop, substantial in size at up to 2.4 metres high, 5.2 metres long, and 3 metres wide. Limestone is the characteristic bedrock of this part of Clare, and a naturally flat or table-like outcrop of that scale would have served the practical needs of clandestine worship well enough. The site was formally noted in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, with the cautious designation of 'possible' mass-rock. That caution was perhaps warranted: in 2010, construction work on the N18 Gort to Crusheen road improvement scheme included a link road to a roundabout just west of Crusheen, and this work appears to have cut through the area of rock outcrop where the mass-rock had been located. Whether the feature survived that intervention, or in what condition, is not recorded.

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Pete F
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