The kill element, from the Irish cill, denotes an early Christian cell or church, and the second part preserves the name of a local saint or founder, suggesting that religious activity here reaches back well beyond the medieval period. The church that survives in this Co. Clare townland is a reminder that such sites were often established in the early centuries of Irish Christianity and then quietly rebuilt, abandoned, and reclaimed by the landscape over the course of a millennium.

The detail of what stands here, its construction, its plan, and the sequence of its use, remains to be properly documented in the public record. What can be said is that Killokennedy sits within a county that contains a remarkable concentration of early ecclesiastical remains, from the famous cloister complex at Corcomroe to far humbler enclosures and graveyards that appear on no tourist map. Clare's geology and its particular pattern of monastic settlement left dozens of such sites scattered across its parishes, many of them still serving as burial grounds long after the church itself fell into ruin. That continuity of use is itself historically telling; communities maintained their connection to these old foundations even when no priest had said mass in them for centuries.