Kill, in the townland of Kilfallinga in County Kerry, derives from the Irish word cill, meaning a church or monastic cell, the kind of small early Christian foundation that once dotted the Irish landscape in their hundreds. The Kil- prefix in Kilfallinga itself reinforces this, suggesting the townland was long defined by such a site, likely a modest enclosure associated with a named figure or community whose memory has otherwise faded from the record.

Sites carrying the cill place-name element tend to date from the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries, when the Irish church organised itself around dispersed monastic communities rather than the centralised parish structure that came later with the Gregorian reforms. Many of these foundations left little above ground; a slight rise, a curve in a field boundary, the persistence of a local name, these are often the only clues that something once stood and mattered. The Fallinga element of the townland name may preserve a personal name, possibly that of a founder or patron saint whose cult was never widely celebrated, one of the countless local holy figures who appear in no martyrology and whose stories, if they were ever written down, have not survived. Kerry has an unusually dense concentration of such early ecclesiastical sites, a reflection of how intensively the southwestern peninsulas were settled and sanctified during that period.