The town of Kilcock takes its name from a place of worship that has almost entirely vanished from the landscape. The Irish form, Cell Choca, means the church of Cocha, and it points to an early monastic foundation that scholars believe dates to the sixth century. Nothing of that original settlement is visible above ground today, yet the name has survived in everyday use for over a millennium, quietly preserving the memory of a community that would otherwise be lost.

The foundation is attributed to a figure named Cocha, also recorded as Chuaca, described in ecclesiastical tradition as a virgin of the sixth century. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, identified Kilcock as the location of her monastery, placing it among the network of early Irish monastic sites that spread across the midlands during the early medieval period. These foundations were often modest in scale, communities gathered around a founding saint whose name would attach itself to the settlement and, eventually, to the landscape itself. Whether the original enclosure, oratory, or any ancillary structures ever left a mark on the ground is now impossible to say; no surface trace of the monument survives. What may represent a continuation of the site's sacred use is a later medieval church and associated graveyard, which could occupy the same ground where Cocha's monastery once stood. The layering of Christian activity across centuries on a single plot is a familiar pattern in Ireland, where early monastic sites were frequently reused, rebuilt upon, and absorbed into the parish system that emerged after the twelfth-century church reforms.