The designation itself, religious house, covers a wide range of possibilities in an Irish context, from modest early medieval hermitages to later Franciscan or Augustinian foundations, and without further detail it is difficult to say precisely what once stood here or how much of it survives.

Cratloe sits at the edge of the Cratloe Hills, a quietly overlooked ridge of woodland and rock that runs above the Shannon where County Clare meets County Limerick. The area has a long human presence, and religious communities throughout medieval Ireland frequently chose elevated or transitional ground, places at the edges of territories or overlooking water, for their foundations. The parish name itself derives from the Irish Creatalach, meaning a place of brushwood or wickerwork, suggesting a landscape that was once more thickly wooded than it appears today. Beyond its registered existence as a monument, the specific history of this particular religious house, its founders, its order, its dates of activity, and its current physical state, remains to be fully documented.