This one, however, stands 1.2 metres high and carries a name that places it within a quiet but widespread tradition of rural Catholic survival. It is known locally as a mass rock, a term for the improvised outdoor altars used by priests to celebrate Mass during the Penal era, when Catholic worship was suppressed under a series of laws enacted from the late seventeenth century onwards. Sheltered by hills on every side and overlooking a stream that marks the boundary between the townland of Curraghmore and its neighbour Roran, the site has the quality of a place chosen deliberately, somewhere enclosed and discreet.

What makes the Curraghmore rock quietly affecting is how little was remembered about it even within living memory of the place itself. During the Schools' Collection project of 1937 to 1938, in which primary school pupils across Ireland gathered local folklore from their communities, a girl named Mary O'Brien, a pupil at Boher School in Bushfield, Nenagh, wrote down the following about the boulder on her family's farm: 'There is also a Mass Rock in our farm. It is surrounded by hills on every side but there is no story known about it.' That single sentence, preserved in Volume 0538 of the collection, says more than it intends to. The rock was known, it was named, it was part of the landscape the family moved through daily, and yet the particular history that gave it its name had already slipped away. Roughly 75 metres to the south-east lies a ringfort, the remains of an early medieval enclosed settlement, suggesting this corner of Curraghmore had been a place of human activity across several distinct periods, each leaving its own quiet mark on the ground.