How a gap made a monument
The devil's dentistry
The story runs like this: the devil, flying over north Tipperary, paused to bite a chunk from the ridge - hence the notch, the Bearnán, the gap. He broke a tooth doing it. In his fury he spat the piece south. It landed thirty kilometres away, became a limestone outcrop, and in time became the Rock of Cashel - seat of the kings of Munster, site of a cathedral, one of Ireland's most-visited monuments. The geology is wrong in every detail. The mountain is sandstone; the Rock is limestone; they have nothing to do with each other. The story doesn't need the geology to be true.
August 1954
The cross on the Rock
A cross was erected on the natural rock outcrop at the summit - the 'bit' itself - in 1953-54, as part of the Marian Year. The Archbishop of Cashel and Emly blessed it on 22 August 1954. On a clear day the summit gives views claimed to reach nine counties: Tipperary, Clare, Galway, Kilkenny, Laois, Limerick, Offaly, Waterford, and Cork on a very good day. Locals have been disagreeing about the Cork since 1954.
The landlord who built the folly
Woodcock Carden
John Rutter Carden inherited the Barnane estate in 1842. He spent the following years clearing tenant farms, earning a string of court cases, and acquiring the nickname 'Woodcock' - supposedly because bullets never found him. He also built a tower on the hillside in the style of an Irish round tower, except round towers were a tenth-century thing and this was a nineteenth-century thing built for the view, or the vanity, or both. In 1854 he was convicted of attempting to abduct Eleanor Arbuthnot, a woman who had declined his proposal, and sentenced to two years in prison. The Barnane estate limped on until 1908, when the Land Commission bought it out under the Wyndham Act. The tower stands. It is called Carden's Folly.