These mass-rocks, as they came to be known, were typically flat-topped outcrops or boulders chosen for their suitability as a makeshift altar surface, often in elevated or otherwise inconspicuous spots where a congregation could gather with some warning of approaching authorities. The one at Doonane sits at the edge of a steep drop, with open views stretching to the south and east, which would have made it practical in exactly that way: anyone watching from below could be seen long before they arrived.

The rock itself is a natural outcrop rather than anything shaped or placed by human hands, which is the case with many such sites across Ireland. What the location adds is a kind of layered strangeness: it now stands inside a coniferous plantation, the planting of which has closed in around a place that was once chosen precisely for its openness and visibility. The high ground and the panoramic aspect that made it useful for clandestine worship are still there beneath the canopy, but the character of the spot has shifted considerably. Roughly 275 metres to the south-west lies a sweat-house, a small stone structure of a type once used for therapeutic sweating, similar in purpose to a sauna, that appears elsewhere across the Irish countryside in association with early and medieval rural life. The proximity of the two features is not explained by any surviving record, but it gives the hilltop an accumulative quality, two remnants of vernacular life sitting quietly together on ground that has since been overtaken by commercial forestry.