More commonly, burial grounds take their identity from the place; here, the place takes its identity from the ground where the dead lie. The name Kilshenane preserves that relationship in the landscape itself.

The burial ground sits a little to the north-east of St Senan's well, a holy well dedicated to the early Irish saint Senan of Scattery Island, whose cult left traces across Munster. The proximity of well and graveyard is typical of early Christian sacred geography in Ireland, where a pattern of associated features, a church site, a holy well, and a burial ground, often clustered together and reinforced one another over centuries. The site was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books of 1841, which noted its role in anchoring the local place-name, and it appears clearly on both the 1841 to 1842 and the 1914 to 1915 Ordnance Survey maps under the designation Kilshenane Graveyard. That continuity across more than seventy years of mapping suggests a site that remained in use and in local memory well into the twentieth century.