Annaghboggaun derives from the Irish, most likely combining words for a marsh or riverside meadow with a diminutive suffix, which suggests a site shaped as much by its wet, low-lying ground as by any human intention. Graveyards with this kind of name tend to occupy marginal land, places that were neither farmed intensively nor easily built upon, and which accumulated the dead across generations precisely because they were otherwise unclaimed.

Beyond the name and its linguistic sediment, the surviving record for this site is thin. It sits within a landscape of Mayo townlands that preserve early ecclesiastical and pre-Christian traces in roughly equal measure, and a graveyard in a location like Ballyteige may well overlie or adjoin an earlier religious enclosure. Many such sites in the west of Ireland began as early medieval burial grounds attached to a small church or hermitage, the church itself long since vanished, leaving only the continued use of the ground by local communities as evidence that something significant once stood there.