The name itself is telling: 'kill' derives from the Irish 'cill', meaning a church or burial ground, and its survival in local memory suggests this low mound was understood, for a long time, as a place set apart for the dead.

The context for those burials is quietly unsettling. Around 1851, when a cist was uncovered nearby at Foulksrath, a contemporary account noted that bodies had also been found in a sand-hill in the area, placed there, it was believed, during an epidemic, because the people were unwilling that they should be buried in the churchyard. The reluctance was likely practical and social rather than simply fearful; in periods of epidemic disease, those who died outside the rites of normal burial, or whose deaths carried stigma or contagion, were sometimes interred away from consecrated ground. The gravel hillock in Connahy, sitting roughly a kilometre north-north-east of Foulksrath Castle, is considered the most probable candidate for the site described in that mid-nineteenth-century account. Foulksrath Castle itself is a tower house of medieval origin, which helps to anchor the broader landscape in a period when such informal burial practices, outside the parish churchyard, would have carried considerable social weight.

What remains above ground today is an unremarkable rise in the land, the kind easily passed without a second look. Its significance lies almost entirely in local memory and in that single reported observation from the 1840s or 1850s, preserving the reasoning of a community that chose, under duress, to bury its dead somewhere other than the ground the church had blessed.