The graveyard here is one of those sites that turns up in the archaeological record without much ceremony, listed and counted but not yet fully explained, a patch of consecrated ground that has been receiving the dead for longer than anyone living can easily account for.

Listerlin itself takes its name from the Irish, most likely derived from a personal name combined with a territorial suffix, a pattern common across Kilkenny's townland map. Graveyards of this kind in rural Ireland frequently occupy the site of an early medieval church or monastic enclosure, the ecclesiastical origin long dissolved but the burial ground persisting, sometimes for well over a thousand years. The presence of a recorded graveyard in a townland of this size suggests that Listerlin once had a more significant religious or community function than its present quietness might imply. Old graveyards in Kilkenny often retain fragmentary stonework, early grave slabs, or the earthwork traces of a surrounding enclosure, though what survives at Listerlin in particular remains to be fully documented.