Local tradition identifies it as a mass-rock, and that designation alone sets it apart from the ordinary landscape of outcrop and bramble.

Mass-rocks are one of the more quietly loaded features of the Irish countryside. During the Penal Laws of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic worship was suppressed by statute, and priests who continued to minister risked transportation or execution. In response, congregations gathered at remote or elevated spots, often using a flat-topped boulder as a makeshift altar, screened from easy view by terrain and vegetation. The hilltop location of the Kilnarovanagh boulder fits this pattern well; height offered both concealment and a vantage point from which an approaching stranger could be spotted in good time. Scrubland, of the kind that still surrounds the site, would have added further cover. Such places were rarely formally recorded in their own time, and much of what is known about them survives through local oral tradition rather than written documentation, which is precisely how this one has come down to us.