It sits in a part of rural Kilkenny where the landscape is worked farmland broken by hedgerows, and where old burial grounds sometimes occupy corners of fields that have been in continuous use far longer than any written account survives to confirm.

The name Ballytarsney derives from the Irish, likely containing the element "tarsna", meaning across or transverse, suggesting a place defined by its position relative to something else, a crossing point, a boundary, a threshold. Graveyards in such liminal locations are common across Ireland, often marking early Christian or even pre-Christian sacred ground. Many rural Kilkenny burial sites grew around the remains of a small church or cell, sometimes no more than a low grass-covered mound by the time later generations were interring their dead nearby. Without more detailed fieldwork notes available, the precise origins of this particular ground remain unclear, but its inclusion in the national monument record places it in company with thousands of sites across the country that carry that quality of unresolved age, places where the soil has been turned for the dead across centuries without anyone thinking to write it down.