Derived from the Latin "desertum" by way of Old Irish "díseart", it denotes a hermitage or place of solitude, the kind of withdrawn spot where an early Christian monk might have sought isolation from the world. That a graveyard survives at Dysart in County Kilkenny is, in itself, a signal that something older lies beneath the ordinary surface of this rural townland, the remnant of a religious settlement that drew people to bury their dead here long after any founding community had dissolved.

Sites carrying the Dysart name across Ireland typically trace their origins to early medieval monasticism, the era of the fifth to twelfth centuries when small, informal communities gathered around a charismatic ascetic or under the patronage of a local dynasty. The graveyard at Dysart, Kilkenny, almost certainly marks the footprint of one such foundation, its continued use for burial preserving the sacred character of a landscape that might otherwise have been entirely forgotten. In many comparable Dysart sites, traces of early church architecture, cross-slabs, or souterrains, underground stone-lined passages associated with early settlement, have been identified in the surrounding ground. Whether any such features survive here, or have yet to be properly documented, remains an open question.