Mass-rock, Greenane, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Mass-rock, Greenane, Co. Kerry

On a sandstone boulder in rough pasture above Kenmare Bay, someone has carved the word 'money' twice.

One inscription is deeply cut and carefully executed; the other is shallowly incised, almost tentative by comparison. The boulder itself is roughly two metres across and only about half a metre high, its upper surface largely flat, which made it serviceable as a mass rock during the Penal Laws era, when Catholic worship was suppressed and priests celebrated Mass outdoors at improvised altars, often on flat-topped rocks in remote or elevated spots. That history is straightforward enough. The word 'money', carved twice, in two different hands or at two different times, is considerably harder to explain.

The boulder sits on sloping ground at around 150 metres above sea level, just south of a long east-west field boundary in Greenane, County Kerry. Scattered across its upper surface are features that complicate any simple reading of the stone. Cupmarks, which are small, roughly hemispherical depressions pecked into rock surfaces and associated in Ireland with prehistoric activity, appear in at least two places, measuring between four and seven centimetres across and up to ten millimetres deep. One of these has at least six pickmarks running along its rim. Towards the northeast corner of the surface, further lines of possible pickmarks run alongside natural-looking hollows. The boulder is approximately 700 metres southwest of a known rock art site at Rossacoosane, which adds weight to the possibility that the prehistoric markings here are genuine rather than incidental. Whether the site was chosen for Mass precisely because it already carried some sense of significance, or simply because the flat surface was convenient, is not recorded.

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