The village itself takes its name from the Irish Cloch na Rón, meaning rock of the seals, but it also holds the designation of a monastery, a classified archaeological monument whose precise details remain, for the moment, unrecorded in any publicly accessible form.

The presence of a monastic site in this part of Connemara is not surprising in itself. The west of Ireland is scattered with the remnants of early Christian foundations, many of them established between the sixth and twelfth centuries, when communities of monks settled in remote or coastal locations, drawn by the relative isolation and the maritime connections that allowed movement between Ireland, Britain, and the Continent. What is less common is to find such a site sitting within or immediately adjacent to a settled village rather than out on a headland or island. Roundstone as a planned settlement was largely laid out in the early nineteenth century, developed by the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo as part of a broader programme of infrastructure and fishery improvement along the Connemara coast, which raises the question of what came before, and how much of an older religious landscape was absorbed or built over in the process.