Demesne burial grounds of this kind were a recurring feature of Irish landed estates, occupying a peculiar position between the formal churchyard and the private family plot. Some served Catholic tenantry displaced from parish graveyards during periods of religious restriction; others were attached to older ecclesiastical sites absorbed into estate landscaping over centuries of ownership change. Which of these histories applies at Dalystown is, for now, difficult to say with certainty.

Dalystown itself takes its name from the Daly family, one of the notable Galway families whose presence shaped the landscape of the county across several centuries. The demesne, like many of its kind in Connacht, would have passed through various hands as estate fortunes shifted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the periods when most such burial grounds came into use or fell out of it. The survival of a burial ground within demesne lands is not unusual in itself, but the combination of its setting and its relative obscurity gives it a particular quiet interest. Many such sites contain no standing monuments at all, just low earthen mounds or a scatter of unlettered stones that resist easy interpretation without closer examination.