The "kil" prefix derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a cell or church, and its presence in a placename almost always signals an early Christian foundation, often pre-Norman, sometimes reaching back to the sixth or seventh century. That a graveyard survives here in County Kerry bearing such a name suggests a continuity of burial and perhaps of worship that stretches across more than a millennium, even if the physical remains above ground tell only a partial story.

Kerry is unusually dense with these early ecclesiastical sites. The southwest of Ireland was, in the early medieval period, a landscape threaded with small monastic settlements and the oratories of wandering ascetics, and many of them left little behind beyond a patch of consecrated ground and a name embedded in the local topography. Graveyards like the one at Kilfallinga often served as the last trace of a vanished community, the church itself long since collapsed or robbed for building stone, the surrounding settlement dissolved into farmland. In some cases a leacht, a simple commemorative stone cairn, or the stump of a carved grave-slab might survive among the grass, though whether any such features are present here is not established in surviving records.