In Irish, "cill mhór" means the great church, and wherever that name attaches to a landscape, a burial ground is rarely far behind. This site in County Clare represents one of those corners of the Irish countryside where the dead have been laid to rest for so long that the precise beginning of the practice is no longer recoverable. Such grounds, often associated with early medieval ecclesiastical foundations, could serve a community for centuries before any written record thought to notice them.

Burial grounds of this type in Clare frequently began as the cemeteries of early Christian churches, some dating to the fifth or sixth century, established by missionaries or locally venerated saints whose names the later historical record only dimly preserves. The "kil" or "cill" place-name element across Ireland marks thousands of these early foundations, many of which left nothing above ground except the enclosing earthwork of a roughly circular or oval graveyard boundary, and the graves themselves. Without further detail from surviving records or excavation, the specific history of this particular ground, its founding figure, its period of active use, and its eventual passage out of regular use, remains to be established.