The name Carrowkeel derives from the Irish An Ceathrú Caol, meaning the narrow quarter, a townland name common enough across Ireland but each time attached to its own particular geography and its own particular past.

Settlement clusters of this kind typically represent the accumulated traces of human habitation across many centuries, sometimes millennia. They might include the earthwork remains of house platforms, field boundaries, enclosures, or the subtle humps and hollows that only reveal themselves in low winter light or from aerial photography. Galway's landscape holds a remarkable density of such sites, many of them inadequately studied, their chronology uncertain and their significance still to be properly worked out. Carrowkeel is one of those places that has been identified and named in the archaeological record without yet having its full story told.