The placename translates roughly as the church or cell of Éinne, and the burial ground associated with it sits within a landscape where early Christian remains are unusually dense, even by the standards of a region that was, from at least the fifth century onwards, a major centre of monastic activity. Saints were said to have come from across Ireland and beyond to study or to be buried here, and local tradition held that the soil of Inis Mór was so holy that bodies would not decay within it.

Saint Éinne is generally dated to the late fifth and early sixth centuries, and the monastery he founded at this eastern end of the island is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential in Ireland, predating the more famous foundations at Clonmacnoise and Iona. The site around Cill Éinne has accumulated centuries of burial, and the ground retains the quality common to early ecclesiastical enclosures in the west of Ireland, where the boundaries between the ancient and the more recent are difficult to read, and where headstones, if they survive at all, are often simple uninscribed slabs rather than the carved monuments familiar from later parish churchyards.

The village of Cill Éinne lies close to the airstrip on Inis Mór, making it one of the more immediately accessible parts of the island, though the burial ground itself rewards a slower approach on foot. The flat limestone terrain of this part of Inis Mór means that the surrounding field systems and the layered archaeology of the early medieval period remain visible in the landscape around the site, giving the burial ground a wider context that is worth taking time to read.