The Irish "Cill Uabhair" points to an early ecclesiastical foundation, a cell or church associated with a figure now largely lost to record. Graveyards of this kind, attached to vanished or ruined churches across the west of Ireland, often represent the oldest continuously used sacred ground in their parishes, with burials sometimes spanning well over a thousand years on the same small plot of land.

Killower sits in an area of east Galway where early Christian settlement left a scattered but legible mark on the landscape. These "cill" sites, named for the small monastic cells or churches that once anchored rural communities, frequently predate the formal parish structures introduced after the twelfth-century reforms of the Irish church. The graveyard almost certainly served as the burial place for the surrounding community across many generations, accumulating layers of memory that the landscape itself gives little outward sign of. Beyond the name and the designation as an archaeological monument, the documentary record for this particular site remains thin.