The townland name itself carries some interest: the glen element suggests a narrow valley, while Ballyvally likely derives from an Irish place-name whose precise meaning remains debated, pointing to the layered and sometimes opaque way rural Irish landscape names accumulated over centuries. That a burial ground exists here at all speaks to a settled, probably longstanding community whose physical traces have not yet been fully brought to light.

Beyond its registration as a monument, the specific history of this site, its age, any associated church or enclosure, the families who buried their dead here, remains undocumented in publicly available records. Graveyards of this kind, scattered across Kilkenny's farmland and hillsides, often began as early medieval burial grounds attached to small ecclesiastical settlements, sometimes continuing in use for centuries after those structures vanished. Without confirmed dates or excavation data for Glenballyvally, that context is general rather than specific, but it frames what the site may represent: a community's long relationship with a particular patch of ground, maintained quietly across generations.