Mass-rocks are among the most quietly charged monuments in the Irish landscape, ordinary stones given extraordinary purpose during the Penal Law era, roughly the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the public practice of Catholicism was prohibited under British rule. With Catholic clergy banned from officiating openly, congregations gathered in remote hillsides, bogland, and valleys, using natural outcrops of stone as makeshift altars. A lookout would watch for soldiers while a priest, who risked transportation or execution if caught, celebrated Mass in the open air. The rocks themselves were rarely modified; their significance was entirely in their use.

The Derreeny example belongs to this tradition. Kerry, with its mountainous terrain and sparse road network, was well suited to clandestine worship, and Mass-rocks survive in considerable numbers across the county. The townland name Derreeny derives from the Irish Doire Eithne or a similar form, suggesting a small oak wood, the kind of sheltered, marginal ground where such gatherings would have made sense. Though the specific history of this particular stone has not been fully documented in surviving records, its designation as a recognised monument places it within a broader pattern of survival, one in which local memory often preserved the identity of these sites long after the Penal Laws were repealed in the early nineteenth century and formal church buildings became possible again.