Killard itself is one of those small coastal places that does not detain many visitors, which is perhaps why the burial ground there has attracted so little written attention. Yet the presence of a graveyard in such a location almost always signals a longer history than the most recent headstones suggest, often marking the site of an early medieval ecclesiastical settlement, a pattern repeated all along the Clare coastline.

Killard, whose name derives from the Irish Cill Ard, meaning high or prominent church, carries in its very placename the suggestion of an early Christian foundation. Such place-name evidence is frequently the most durable record of a vanished church or oratory, long since robbed for building stone or simply dissolved back into the ground. Graveyards on these sites continued to receive burials for centuries after the original structures disappeared, maintained by local communities for whom the ground retained its sanctity regardless of what stood, or no longer stood, within it.