In Irish, "cill" denotes a early Christian church or cell, and "Colman" points to one of the numerous saints of that name who scattered small foundations across Ireland in the early medieval period. A graveyard bearing such a placename in County Kerry almost certainly marks one of those sites where a modest religious community once gathered, leaving little above ground beyond the burial ground itself and the persistent memory encoded in the townland name.

Kerry is dense with these killeen-type sites, where a patron saint's name clings to a patch of ground long after any associated structure has vanished or been absorbed into later use. The "cill" element appears throughout the county's townland names, each one a faint cartographic echo of the early church's spread through the landscape between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries. At many such sites the graveyard outlasted everything else, continuing in use across generations simply because the ground was already considered sacred and the community knew it as the place where their dead belonged.