The element "kill" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, a prefix that signals early Christian settlement across hundreds of Irish place names. That a church site is recorded here is no surprise, but the specifics of what survives, when it was built, and by whom remain largely undocumented in publicly available sources.

The site is listed as a church monument, which in the Irish archaeological record can mean anything from a substantial medieval nave-and-chancel ruin to little more than a grassed-over foundation visible only as a slight rise in a field. County Kilkenny has a particularly dense concentration of medieval parish churches, many of them dating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Anglo-Norman settlement reshaped the religious landscape of Leinster. Whether the Kilvinoge site belongs to that wave of building, or to an earlier Gaelic-Irish foundation, is not something the currently available record makes clear.