Under the Faerie Hill

 From The Abbey of Misrule:

Tobar Gráinne, the well we were seeking, was supposed to lie on the top of some hills. One of the hills contained a collection of neolithic tombs, said to be around 4,500 years old. There was also, as the sign indicates, a mass rock. Mass rocks are common in Ireland, and are often marked like this. Back in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Irish Parliament, under the control of the Protestant Ascendancy which had been importing landowners from England and Scotland to settle, and ultimately convert, Catholic areas of the country, instituted a series of laws known collectively as the Penal Laws, which in many places made it difficult or impossible to celebrate the Catholic Mass.

Edmund Burke, the original conservative philosopher, described the Penal Laws as ‘a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’ Those who were oppressed by them though, did not always take their degradation lying down. Refusing to relinquish their faith, priests would hold secret masses in remote parts of the countryside, or in houses or barns. A ‘mass rock’ is simply a flat stone, usually in a remote place, which was used as an altar for one of these surreptitious masses. (Read more.)