Deserted medieval settlements are among the quieter categories of archaeological site in Ireland, easy to overlook because they leave so little above ground: a softening of field boundaries, a slight unevenness in the soil, earthwork humps where walls once stood. What was once a working cluster of houses, perhaps with a surrounding enclosure or cultivated ridges, is now a feature of the land rather than a feature anyone built.

The story of why medieval settlements were abandoned across Ireland is rarely straightforward. Some communities disappeared during the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Others were cleared during later plantation and land consolidation, their inhabitants displaced to make way for new agricultural arrangements. In some cases, shifts in climate or soil exhaustion made a particular location unviable. Without detailed excavation records or documentary evidence specific to Kilcooly, it is not possible to say which of these pressures, or which combination of them, emptied this particular place. The townland name itself preserves something older, most likely derived from the Irish, but the people who once gave the settlement its daily life left no account of their departure.