Graveyards of this type, found scattered across rural Connacht, frequently mark the sites of much older activity, sometimes a medieval parish church long since reduced to a few courses of stone, sometimes an early Christian enclosure, sometimes simply a community's decision, repeated across generations, to keep burying their dead in the same ground.

Ballynacourty as a placename derives from the Irish Baile na Cúirte, meaning the townland of the court or mansion, which hints at some history of settlement or local significance in the area, though what specific structures or events shaped this particular burial ground remains, for now, unrecorded in accessible detail. Galway's western parishes contain many such sites where the documentary record is thin and the archaeology has yet to be fully examined, leaving the ground itself as the primary source of whatever story there is to tell.