The name Killonerry itself carries the echo of an early ecclesiastical foundation; the "Kill" prefix derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a cell or small church, often associated with the earliest period of Christian settlement in Ireland, when solitary monks or small communities established places of worship that would later give their names to the surrounding land. That alone suggests this site has a long history, possibly stretching back to the early medieval period, even if the visible remains are later in date.

Beyond the territorial memory embedded in the place name, detailed documentation for this particular site remains sparse at present. Killonerry is a small townland, and like many such foundations in Kilkenny, the church here may represent one of the countless rural parishes that functioned through the medieval period before falling into disuse following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a pattern repeated across the Irish countryside as population shifted and religious infrastructure was reorganised or simply abandoned. Without more specific architectural or historical detail to hand, the site sits in that category of places that are known to exist, are formally recognised as monuments, but whose full story has yet to be properly told.