The place name itself offers a clue to its origins: "Cluain" in Irish generally refers to a meadow or secluded pasture, and such names frequently attach to early ecclesiastical sites, where monks or hermits sought out sheltered, fertile ground for small settlements. Whether this site follows that pattern is difficult to say with certainty, but the ruin is recorded as a protected monument, suggesting it has survived long enough to be considered of significant historical interest.

Beyond that, the documentary record currently available for Clonlea is sparse. The site sits in County Clare, a county with a dense concentration of early medieval church foundations, many of them modest in scale and long since roofless, their congregations gone and their dedications sometimes forgotten. Ruins of this type are often associated with a pattern of rural parish organisation that developed in Ireland between roughly the tenth and thirteenth centuries, as local lords and ecclesiastical authorities formalised the landscape into defined territories. Without more specific information about Clonlea, it is not possible to say who founded it, when it fell out of use, or what architectural features the remaining fabric preserves.