"Kil" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, and its pairing here with a personal name suggests a site associated with a founding figure, likely from the early medieval period when such dedications were common across the Irish countryside. That a graveyard survives in this location is itself a kind of continuity, communities in Ireland having buried their dead beside the sites of early churches for well over a thousand years, long after the original structures crumbled or were forgotten.

Kildalton sits within a county that contains a remarkable concentration of medieval ecclesiastical remains, and graveyards attached to long-vanished churches are scattered throughout its townlands. In many such cases the church itself has left little more than a slight rise in the ground or a scatter of dressed stone, while the burial ground persists in active or occasional use, its boundaries maintained by habit and local memory rather than any formal structure. Without more detailed records currently available for this particular site, the specifics of its founding, its associated church, and the character of its surviving fabric remain to be properly documented.