This site in Dunmanway, County Cork, is classified as a mass-rock, a term for the outdoor locations where Catholic priests celebrated Mass during the Penal Law era, when public Catholic worship was suppressed and priests were subject to arrest or worse. These were rarely formal monuments; they were whatever flat or prominent surface was to hand, often in remote terrain, sometimes in plain sight once the danger had passed and memory had softened into local custom.

What makes the Dunmanway example quietly interesting is the paper trail left by successive Ordnance Survey editions. The 1842 first edition and the 1903 second edition both record the site as Priest's Rock, a name that points clearly enough to its religious association, even if the precise origin of that name had already been forgotten by those living nearby when the site was recorded. By the time the third edition was produced in 1935, the wider geological feature had acquired a different designation altogether: Hexagon Rock, according to the landowner at the time. Whether this reflects a shift in local memory, a preference for a more descriptive label, or simply the way that older associations can quietly slip away across a few generations, is not recorded. The two names sit in the archive like two photographs taken from slightly different angles, neither quite explaining the other.