Kiltartan derives from the Irish Cill Tartain, meaning the church of a figure known as Tartan or Tartán, and wherever there is a cill, a burial ground is rarely far away. The graveyard here is one of those quietly persistent places that outlast almost everything around them, continuing in use, or at least in memory, long after the ecclesiastical structures that gave them purpose have crumbled or vanished entirely.

Kiltartan sits in a landscape already dense with association. The area falls within the territory once dominated by the Mac Giolla Ceallaigh family and later came within the orbit of the Persse and Gregory estates. Lady Augusta Gregory, the playwright and folklorist who co-founded the Abbey Theatre with W. B. Yeats, lived at nearby Coole Park, and the cultural world she gathered around her in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew heavily on the local place names, stories, and speech of this part of east Galway. A graveyard bearing the name of the parish would have been known to her, and to the tenant families whose oral traditions she collected. Early ecclesiastical graveyards of this type, often called cillíní or parish burial grounds depending on their history and use, can contain marked and unmarked graves spanning many centuries, with layers of interment that reflect the shifting fortunes of local communities across famine, clearance, and emigration.

The site lies in a part of Galway where the limestone plain of the Burren fringe gives way to slightly softer agricultural land, and old enclosures and field boundaries in this region frequently preserve the outlines of much earlier land use. A graveyard attached to an early church site would typically be set apart by a roughly circular or oval enclosing wall, a form inherited from the monastic tradition of the early medieval period. Whether that original enclosure survives here in any legible form is not currently documented in accessible records, which leaves the physical details of the site, for now, a matter for those who visit in person.