The townland name, Kildavnet, preserves the memory of a saint: Davenat, or Damhnait, a figure associated with early Christian settlement along this stretch of the Mayo coast. A ruined tower house and a small medieval church still stand here, the church said to bear her name, marking a site that has been a place of religious and strategic significance for the better part of a thousand years.

The tower house at Kildavnet is frequently linked to Grace O'Malley, the sixteenth-century chieftain and sea captain whose influence extended across the islands and inlets of Connacht. Whether she occupied it directly or simply claimed it as one of several strongholds along her maritime territory is the kind of question that tends to follow her name. The church beside it is older, a simple single-cell structure of the type common to early medieval Irish Christianity, roofless now but with its walls largely intact. Together, the two buildings form an unusually legible pairing: the ecclesiastical foundation predating the military one by several centuries, yet both now sharing the same quietly overgrown enclosure above the water.