Mass-rocks are among the more quietly extraordinary survivals in the Irish landscape, ordinary stones made extraordinary by the circumstances that pressed them into use. During the Penal Laws of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic worship was suppressed across Ireland, priests were outlawed or banished, and congregations were forced to gather in the open air, often on remote hillsides or in sheltered hollows, using a large flat stone as a makeshift altar. These gatherings carried real risk; lookouts were posted, and the choice of location was deliberate, favouring spots with good sightlines and quick escape routes.

The Clare landscape is particularly well supplied with such sites, a reflection of how deeply the Penal period shaped religious practice in the west of Ireland. The rocks themselves were rarely carved or formally marked; their significance lay entirely in use and memory, passed down through local communities long after the laws that necessitated them had been repealed. That communal memory is often what preserves them, since there is little in the stone itself to distinguish it from any other outcrop. The site at Ballydonaghan belongs to this wider pattern, one of many such locations recorded across the county where Catholic communities maintained continuity of worship through clandestine means.