One of the most common stories or themes about the Hunting Lodge itself concerns the supernatural retaliation of the Devil, who is said to have blown the roof off the newly constructed Hunting Lodge in revenge for the destruction of the tomb by William Conolly.  The tale appears in remarkably consistent form in a number of accounts of the site from the eighteenth century onwards.  Each one of the tales remarked that the same night the Hunting Lodge was finished, a great wind suddenly sprang up and blew the roof off the building.  The tales further relate that Conolly was undeterred by the destruction wrought by either the winds or the Devil, and had the roof reconstructed in stone, thus giving the building its rather forbidding appearance.  Ordering the destruction of the tomb may have been something of a statement by William Conolly.  Even to this day, many monuments are imbued with superstition, or piseog – to damage a ‘fairy fort’ is to bring damnation and a curse upon yourself.  Ancient tombs and cairns such as the one that once stood on Montpelier Hill were almost certainly viewed by some to be places of the ‘otherworld’, protected by powerful supernatural beings and only to be trifled with at your peril.  Perhaps by his destruction of the tomb, Conolly was attempting to declare that he was a man of the Enlightenment, a man of ‘Reason’ and ‘Science’ and above the petty superstitions of the common people.  How his workmen who carried out the demolition felt about their task is unknown, but it is easy to imagine a few knowing looks were exchanged when the roof was blown off, and perhaps more again when Conolly died just a few short years after the Hunting Lodge was constructed.