The Reilig: Where Ancestors Became Stone

Subtitle: On Kildoney Glebe, memory persists in Mass Rocks, burial grounds, and a church older than the conquest.

The Land That Remembers

There’s a field in Kildoney Glebe, County Donegal, owned once by Thomas McNeely—a native of Kildoney listed in the 1858 Griffith’s Valuation. This field carries a name that speaks plainly: “The Reilig” (Irish: An Reilig, the graveyard). And as the historical record confirms, it was exactly that.

In this field stands another Mass Rock, one of hundreds scattered across Ireland—physical evidence of the centuries when practicing the Catholic faith meant risking death. When priests were hunted like criminals and congregations gathered in secret at remote stone altars under open sky, praying the persecution would end before the soldiers arrived.

The Mass Rock at The Reilig wasn’t decoration. It was survival infrastructure.

Cill Domhnaigh: The Sunday Church

The name Kildoney comes from the Irish Cill Domhnaigh—literally “Sunday Church” or “Lord’s Day Church.” This naming convention indicates an early Christian foundation, one significant enough to mark the entire townland. According to historical documentation, there is evidence that a church once stood here, founded by St. Patrick himself.

The text is clear: “In the name Kildoney, Cill-domhnaigh—i.e. Sunday Church, we have evidence that there was at one time or other a church in that district, which was founded by St. Patrick himself.”

According to the Tripartite Life and other sources, churches bearing the name Domnach (or in anglicized form, Donagh or Dony) were originally founded by St. Patrick and were called such because he marked out their foundations on Sunday—Dominica, the Lord’s day. While nothing now remains to mark this early foundation, the existence of a burial ground in Kildoney is satisfactory proof of a Christian Church having been at some time standing there.

The pattern holds across Ireland: where old burial grounds are situated, churches were originally attached to them. Their names may be lost, their walls crumbled into soil, but the graves remain—and with them, the memory of what once stood.

The Mass Rock and Cave

Beyond the church ruins and the graveyard, there’s something else: a cave on the south side of The Reilig field, with a very narrow entrance.

This isn’t random geography. Caves near Mass Rocks served as hiding places for priests, confessionals carved from stone necessity, storage for sacred vessels that couldn’t be found when the soldiers came through. The cave’s narrow entrance would have made it easy to defend, hard to detect, perfect for the kind of worship that had to happen in darkness.

But caves have older purposes in Irish tradition. The Filidh—the poet-seers, the Mac an Fhilidh (sons of the poets) from whom I descend—practiced imbas forosnai (great knowledge that illuminates). One method involved sensory deprivation: darkness, silence, isolation in enclosed spaces where ordinary perception ended and vision began. Caves served this purpose long before they became refuges for persecuted priests.

Was The Reilig’s cave used for imbas before it became a Mass Rock? Did the Filidh families of Kildoney—the McNeelys among them—carry forward both practices, layering Christian prayer over older divination rites in the same stone darkness?

The historical record doesn’t say. But the cave remains, narrow-mouthed and waiting, in a graveyard named for remembrance, on land held by poet-descendant families.

Mass Rocks were used throughout Ireland from the mid-1600s through the 1700s during the Penal Laws (1695-1756), when Catholic bishops were banished, priests had to register (or hide), and practicing the faith openly meant arrest or death. Some Mass Rocks—like the Ardaghey Mass Rock in Donegal—remained in use into the 1890s, long after Catholic Emancipation in 1829, simply because poverty and isolation dictated their continued necessity.

The Catsby Cave Mass Rock near Ballyshannon, just miles from Kildoney, was described this way:

“Mass was celebrated at sites such as this during Penal times (c. 1695 to c. 1750) as Catholics were forced to hold secret services in isolated and secluded locations… It was an offence punishable by death for a priest to practice Catholic mass. Although located relatively close to the town of Ballyshannon, ‘Catsby Cave’ is well-hidden and protected on three sides by sheer rock walls, and would have been a perfect site for secret services.”

The cave at The Reilig likely served similar purposes—a sanctuary within a graveyard, where the living hid to pray among the dead.

The Kildoney Men’s Case: Fighting for Indigenous Rights

The 1858 Griffith’s Valuation lists Thomas McNeely as tenant on Plot 15 of Kildoney Glebe. His grandson—also named Thomas McNeely (born 1871)—and Thomas’s brother Francis became central figures in one of Ireland’s most significant indigenous rights cases: The Kildoney Men’s Case (1925-1927).

In June 1925, six Kildoney fishermen—including members of the McNeely family—deliberately defied the Erne Fishery Company’s claim to exclusive fishing rights on the Erne Estuary. They pushed their tar and canvas boat into the water and fished the estuary that had belonged to their people since time immemorial, knowing full well they’d be arrested for “poaching.”

They were arrested. And they fought back in court.

The case went all the way through the Irish legal system, and the Kildoney Men won. The court ruled that the fishing rights on the Erne belonged to the Irish people, not to English landlords or corporate fishing monopolies. It was a landmark victory—Irish indigenous rights established through Brehon Law precedent against British colonial fishing monopolies.

Pat McNeely, Thomas’s grandson (and Francis’s nephew), said it plainly: “My grandad and uncle would be turning in their graves to see no fishing on the estuary.”

Pat and I both descend from Thomas McNeely, the Kildoney fisherman born in 1871—he’s my 3rd great-grandfather and Pat’s grandfather. We’re separated by two generations, cousins through the fishing families who fought for indigenous rights and won.

Because the victory was short-lived. Within decades, modern fishing restrictions and the destruction of the Assaroe Falls (one of Ireland’s natural wonders, destroyed in the 1950s for a hydroelectric power station) devastated the salmon runs. The fishing rights the Kildoney Men fought for were lost again—this time not to English colonizers, but to so-called “progress.”

What Persists

The Reilig isn’t isolated. Within a few miles of Kildoney Glebe, the landscape is thick with archaeological sites: raths (ringforts), cairns, standing stones, holy wells, ecclesiastical ruins. The area around rural Ballyshannon is dense with evidence of continuous sacred use spanning millennia—from megalithic tombs to early Christian foundations to Penal-era Mass Rocks.

This density isn’t accidental. It suggests educational infrastructure—the kind of landscape clustering you see around monastic sites, bardic schools, places where knowledge-keepers gathered, taught, preserved, and transmitted across generations.

The Filidh didn’t just live here. They built here. They marked the landscape with stone circles and burial chambers, church foundations and holy wells, creating a network of sacred sites that doubled as teaching grounds. When persecution came, they adapted—using the same caves for Christian Mass that their ancestors might have used for imbas divination.

The stones don’t forget. The graves don’t forget. The names encoded in the landscape don’t forget.

And neither do I.

The 1858 Griffith’s Valuation lists Thomas McNeely as tenant of Plot 15—this was during a time when Irish Catholics were just beginning to reclaim property rights after centuries of colonial theft. His grandson, Thomas McNeely (born 1871), is my 3rd great-grandfather. Thomas and his brother Francis fought for fishing rights using ancient law against modern monopolies, and won. At least for a while.

Why This Matters Now

Kildoney Glebe is currently being subdivided and sold—ancient archaeological sites, burial grounds, Mass Rock locations, and church foundations being carved up into real estate parcels. The land that held Mass during persecution, that buried generations of the faithful, that stood as proof of indigenous rights in Irish courts, is being sold piece by piece.

This isn’t just “some field in Donegal.” This is evidence. This is infrastructure. This is memory encoded in stone, earth, names, and the legal record itself.

I descend from Thomas McNeely and the Kildoney fishing families. My ancestors held this land as tenants on a Church of Ireland glebe, buried their dead in The Reilig, likely celebrated Mass at that rock when it was illegal to do so, and fought successfully in Irish courts for indigenous fishing rights using Brehon Law.

They encoded their truth in landscape, in legal precedent, in names that persist.

I will not let that encoding be erased.

Sources:

• Historical texts on Kildoney church foundations and burial grounds
• Griffith’s Valuation, 1858: Thomas McNeely, Plot 15, Kildoney Glebe, Kilbarron Parish
• Irish Central: “Erne Go Bragh: Irish fishermen’s fight for fishing freedom” (June 15, 2025)
• Mass Rock documentation: findamassrock.com, Buildings of Ireland, Irish Folklore Commission records
• Logainm.ie: Cill Domhnaigh/Kildoney Glebe placename documentation
• Townlands.ie: Kildoney Glebe townland information

Geographic Context:

• Kildoney Glebe, Kilbarron Civil Parish, Ballyshannon Rural ED, Barony of Tirhugh, County Donegal
• Coordinates: 54° 31′ 23″ N, 8° 15′ 13″ W
• On Donegal Bay coast, served historically by St. John’s Point Lighthouse
• Between Ballyshannon and Rossnowlagh, along the Wild Atlantic Way

The stones remember. The graves remember. The names remember.

An Reilig: where ancestors became stone, and stone became evidence.