The place takes its name from Saint Credan, an early Irish monastic figure associated with this stretch of coastline, and the burial ground sits close to the ruins of a medieval church that once served the scattered communities along this edge of the county. Graveyards of this type, attached to early ecclesiastical foundations and continuously used across many centuries, often hold a compressed and layered record of local life: the oldest stones worn to near illegibility, later ones bearing the surnames that still appear on the roads and townlands nearby.

Kilcredaun itself occupies a narrow finger of land between Kilrush to the east and the broad mouth of the Shannon to the south and west. The peninsula has historically been defined by water on most sides, which lent it a degree of isolation even as traffic moved constantly along the estuary. The church ruin and graveyard represent a site of considerable age in this landscape, associated with the early Christian period and persisting through the medieval centuries. Such sites were frequently chosen for their proximity to water, either for practical reasons of settlement or because early monks sought the margins of the known world, the edge places where sea and land negotiate their boundary.