A mass-rock once stood here, just east of a small stream and along the northern edge of the townland boundary, and local memory long associated it with clandestine Catholic worship during the Penal era. The rock itself, however, is gone, broken up at some point in the past and pressed into service as building material for the surrounding field boundaries.

Mass-rocks were flat or table-like stones used as improvised altars during the Penal Laws, the series of statutes in force broadly from the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth that severely restricted Catholic practice in Ireland. Priests operated outside the law, and congregations gathered in remote spots, on hillsides, in bogs, and along field margins, wherever the landscape offered concealment. The rock at Gortnaprocess fits that pattern precisely: a boggy, marginal location beside a stream, away from roads and settlements. What makes this site unusual is not its history of use but its fate afterwards. The very stone that served as an altar was later dismantled, its material recycled into the mundane infrastructure of farming. The field walls that still divide the land around Gortnaprocess may quietly contain fragments of it.