In Irish townland nomenclature, "kil" most commonly derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, and a graveyard associated with such a settlement in County Kilkenny points toward early Christian origins of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in considerable number. Many such burial grounds fell out of formal use centuries ago, their parent churches long since vanished, leaving only the ground itself as evidence that a community once gathered here to bury its dead.

Kilkenny as a county has an exceptionally dense concentration of early ecclesiastical sites, a consequence of its importance during the early medieval period when small monastic communities and local church foundations proliferated across the landscape. Graveyards associated with these foundations, sometimes called cillíní or disused parish burial grounds depending on their character and history, frequently survive as low earthen enclosures, occasionally with the faint outlines of earlier structures visible beneath the grass. Without more specific records it is not possible to say with certainty what period the Kiltown site represents, who founded it, or when it fell out of regular use, but the townland name alone suggests the memory of an ecclesiastical presence stretching back well before the medieval period of Anglo-Norman reorganisation.