Kilmurry derives from the Irish Cill Muire, meaning the church of Mary, and wherever that place-name appears on the Irish landscape it almost always signals an early ecclesiastical site, often pre-Norman, frequently marked today by nothing more visible than a graveyard that has quietly outlasted whatever structure once stood at its centre. The burial ground here is one of those places where the ground itself is the record, the church long gone and the headstones left to hold the memory.

Kilmurry graveyards of this type typically have roots stretching back to the early medieval period, when small monastic communities or parish churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary became focal points for the surrounding population. The dead were buried close to consecrated ground as a matter of spiritual necessity, and so these sites accumulated centuries of interments long after the original buildings crumbled or were cleared away. In Clare especially, where the landscape is dotted with the remnants of early Christian foundations, such graveyards often represent an unbroken tradition of burial stretching from the early medieval period into living memory. The stones themselves, where they survive, can range from rough uninscribed slabs to more elaborate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century memorials bearing the names of local families.