The name itself is the first puzzle. "Kil" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or burial ground, often one associated with an early Christian foundation, and the full placename suggests a site with roots that may considerably predate the neat enclosure visible today.

The graveyard occupies an area roughly 46 metres east to west and 18 metres north to south, bounded by an earthen bank standing about 1.7 metres high. That kind of enclosing bank, rather than a stone wall, points toward an older tradition of demarcating sacred ground, one that predates the more familiar cut-stone boundary walls of post-medieval Catholic cemeteries. The interior is overgrown, but many grave markers remain visible within it. At the western end of the enclosure stands a Roman Catholic church, suggesting a continuity of use on this hillside that stretches across very different periods of Irish religious life. The pairing of an ancient enclosed burial ground with a functioning church is not unusual in rural Ireland, where later congregations often gathered at sites that already carried a sense of sanctity, but here the earthen bank makes the older layer of the site unusually legible.