Kilmacduane derives from the Irish "Cill Mhic Duáin", meaning the church of the son of Duán, pointing to an early ecclesiastical foundation of the kind that once dotted the Clare landscape in considerable numbers. These early Christian sites, many of them established between the sixth and ninth centuries, typically began as modest enclosures around which communities buried their dead across generations, layering the ground with centuries of occupation that outlasted any standing structure above it.