Two are set upright, positioned at roughly right angles to one another, and a third, considerably larger, rests across them and on the ground to the west. The whole structure is modest, almost accidental-looking. But local memory has preserved its purpose: this is a mass rock, an improvised outdoor altar of the kind used by Catholic communities in Ireland during the Penal era, when the public practice of Catholicism was suppressed under a series of laws enacted from the late seventeenth century onward.

Mass rocks were not built so much as assembled from whatever the landscape offered. A priest and congregation would gather at a remote or sheltered spot, often with a lookout posted, and Mass would be celebrated over a flat stone that served as an altar. The choice of location here, in rough pasture on a slope that falls steeply to the north, is characteristic: elevated enough to allow a wide view of the surrounding land, yet sufficiently out of the way to discourage casual attention. The two upright sandstone slabs, the taller measuring just under eighty centimetres in height, support a horizontal slab roughly one and a half metres long and nearly as tall. The dimensions are plain and functional. There was no effort at permanence or ornament; the point was the act of worship, not the architecture.

The site sits north of a natural rock outcrop near Ratooragh, and the surrounding land retains the rough, unimproved character that would have made this corner of West Cork useful to those who needed to gather quietly and without notice.