That absence is, in its own way, the whole story.

Mass rocks were the improvised altars of penal-era Ireland, flat stones in remote or sheltered spots where Catholic priests celebrated Mass in secret during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the practice was banned under the Penal Laws. Congregations would gather on hillsides or in hollows, with lookouts posted for soldiers or informers. The rocks themselves were rarely grand; their significance was entirely circumstantial, attached not to the stone but to what took place upon it. The one at Cooper's Rock followed a pattern common across Munster: a slope with some natural shelter and a degree of seclusion, far enough from the road to offer warning. At some point, according to local knowledge, it was destroyed. The precise circumstances of that destruction are not recorded.