The placename itself offers a starting point: Kilmurry derives from the Irish Cill Mhuire, meaning the church of Mary, a dedication found scattered across Ireland wherever early Christian communities established themselves, often at sites of considerable age. A Marian dedication does not pin down a founding date, but it does suggest roots that predate the more systematic church-building of the Anglo-Norman period, when parish structures were formalised and older, informally established sites were sometimes absorbed, sometimes replaced.

Beyond the name and the physical fact of the structure's presence in the landscape, the documentary record for this particular church has not yet been made publicly available, and the details that would normally anchor an account, construction date, architectural features, associated burials, changes in use over the centuries, remain unconfirmed for now. What can be said is that Kilkenny as a county has an unusually dense concentration of early ecclesiastical remains, a consequence of its position as a centre of both Gaelic and later Anglo-Norman religious activity. Churches in townlands like Kilmurry often served small rural communities continuously through the medieval period before falling into disuse following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving behind roofless shells that gradually became absorbed into the field and burial landscape around them.