It measures less than a metre across in either direction, its flat top worn smooth, its lower portion buried in the stonework. Easy to miss, easier to ignore. But this modest slab is a mass-rock, one of the outdoor altars used by Catholic priests to celebrate Mass in secret during the Penal Laws, the body of legislation that from the late seventeenth century severely restricted Catholic worship in Ireland. With churches suppressed and clergy hunted, congregations gathered in remote fields, hillsides, and woodland clearings, using flat-topped stones as makeshift altars. The rocks that survive are among the quieter, more unassuming remnants of that period.

This particular stone has not always sat where it does now. Writing in 1932, Lee recorded that it had originally stood on the west side of a bothairín, a small rural laneway, roughly fifty yards north of a place called Tobar a' Chaipín, a named holy well, where Mass had been celebrated during the Penal period. It was moved at some point, and local tradition attached something unsettling to that removal: bells, it was said, tolled each night at the original site after the stone was taken away. A later account by Roche, writing in 1988, also noted the displacement but placed the stone's original position inside what is now known as the Priest's Wood, the large area of woodland immediately to the east. Whether the discrepancy between the two accounts reflects a difference in sources or simply in how the local geography was understood, both writers agreed that the stone had been shifted from its original location, and both recognised the Priest's Wood as significant. The name alone suggests a landscape that quietly remembers what happened there.