The legend says that the devil broke his teeth taking this bite and spat the Rock of Cashel from his mouth to where it now stands.

It is an illuminated manuscript copy of the four Gospels and was written in the monastery of St. Cronan in Roscrea some time during the 8th century.

He then used miraculous powers to ensure that the sun did not set for forty days, and Dimma spent all of this period completing the manuscript without feeling the need to eat or sleep.

There is some debate about whether or not the manuscript was actually found on the Devil's Bit amid claims that it could not have survived without damage in an outdoor environment for over two centuries.

The meeting was part of a wider campaign of resistance to the payment of tithes (one-tenth of the value of arable produce) to the Church of Ireland by the majority Catholic population.

A semi-fictional account of the meeting was given by Samuel Lover in Legends and Stories of Ireland (1834), where he refers to a mock 'burial' of the tithes by local peasantry.

A 1980 article in the journal Nature described the finding on the mountain of the earliest record of a fossil flora containing Cooksonia-type sporangia.

The valley in which Roscrea stands separates this end of Slieve Bloom from the Devil's Bit range, which begins immediately south of the town and runs southwest.

When the cross was erected, it was said that nine counties can be viewed from the summit – Tipperary itself, Clare, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Laois, Limerick, Offaly, and Waterford.

One can see the Knockmealdown and Comeragh Mountains in Waterford, along with the Galtees, and, to the north-west, Lough Derg and the River Shannon.