In Irish, it derives from "cill", meaning a church or early Christian burial enclosure, and "clochain", referring to stepping stones or, in some readings, stone cells of the kind associated with early monastic settlement. A graveyard bearing that name in County Galway is likely to be old in ways that its present appearance may not immediately suggest, the kind of site where the ground itself has been considered sacred for well over a thousand years.

Graveyards attached to early Irish church sites often occupy ground that was first set apart during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, when small monastic communities or the foundations of local saints shaped the religious landscape of the west of Ireland. Many such sites continued in use as parish burial grounds long after any associated church fell into ruin, and in some cases the ruins themselves have entirely vanished, leaving only the boundary of the enclosure and the graves within it as evidence of what once stood there. The name Kilcloghans suggests this kind of continuity, a place that was named for its stones and its church, and that has quietly persisted.

The documentary record for this particular site remains sparse, and little specific detail about its history, any standing remains, or the extent of the enclosure is currently available in published sources. What can be said is that graveyards of this type in Connacht frequently preserve traces worth looking for: early grave slabs, the curve of an ancient enclosing bank, or the stub of a church wall absorbed into a later boundary. Whether any of these survive at Kilcloghans remains, for now, an open question.