The Irish name Cill Chomáin points to an early ecclesiastical origin, cill being the Old Irish word for a church or monastic cell, often associated with a founding saint. Chomáin suggests a dedication to Saint Coman, though several saints of that name appear in Irish hagiography, making precise identification difficult. The second name, Poll an Tsómais, introduces a different register entirely, a placename with a more vernacular, local character that may preserve an older memory of the landscape quite separate from the religious one. That a single graveyard should carry both names, one sacred and institutional, one rooted in the particular texture of the local land, is itself quietly revealing.

Early Christian graveyards of this type, known in Irish as cillíní or teampall sites depending on their character, were frequently established beside or within earlier sacred enclosures. A founding figure, real or legendary, would lend his name to the place, and the ground would accumulate burials across many centuries, sometimes continuing long after any associated church structure had vanished entirely. In parts of Connacht, these sites persisted as active burial grounds well into the nineteenth century, particularly for unbaptised children or others who could not, under the customs of the time, be interred in consecrated parish ground. Whether Poll an Tsómais preserves a geographical feature of the immediate terrain, perhaps a hollow or pit in the land, is not clear from what survives, but such practical landscape descriptors often outlast the people who coined them by many hundreds of years.