It is the kind of townland name that signals a medieval religious presence, most likely a friary or monastic landholding, and the graveyard that survives there in County Galway is one of those sites that outlasted whatever community once maintained it. Burial grounds like this one, sometimes called cilliní or simply old graveyards, have a habit of persisting long after the structures around them have vanished, kept in local memory and occasionally still in use for generations after any formal ecclesiastical connection has dissolved.

Friarsland as a place-name almost certainly derives from an association with a mendicant order, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Carmelites being the orders most active across Connacht during the medieval period, establishing houses and acquiring lands throughout Galway and its surrounds. Graveyards attached to such properties often continued to receive burials even after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century stripped the friars of their lands and buildings. The ground itself retained a sanctity in the minds of local communities that official suppression rarely managed to extinguish. Beyond that general context, the specific history of this particular burial ground, its founding, its extent, and any monuments or markers it contains, remains to be fully documented.