The place-name itself offers the first clue: Kilfarboy derives from the Irish Cill Fharbhaigh, indicating an early ecclesiastical foundation, likely associated with a now-obscure local saint. In Clare, as elsewhere in the west of Ireland, such sites often began as simple monastic enclosures in the early medieval period, accumulating centuries of burials long after any church building fell into ruin or was replaced. The result is a landscape where the dead of many different eras lie in the same ground, and where the earliest grave markers may be little more than uncut stones pressed into the earth at an angle.

Kilfarboy parish sits in the Miltown Malbay area of west Clare, a stretch of coast that saw considerable pressure during and after the Famine years of the 1840s. Rural graveyards in this region frequently absorbed the unnamed dead of that period alongside the marked graves of earlier generations, which gives sites like this a layered, sometimes painful significance that goes well beyond their archaeological interest. The parish name itself appears in older ecclesiastical records associated with the broader barony of Ibrickan, and the graveyard likely predates any post-Reformation church infrastructure in the immediate locality.