The village itself is perhaps best known internationally through a song rather than a building: the ballad "Kilkelly, Ireland," composed in 1982 by the American songwriter Peter Jones from a series of letters his great-great-grandfather sent to a son who had emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. Those letters, spanning decades, document evictions, deaths, failed harvests, and the slow emptying of a community. The church at the centre of that community sat quietly through all of it.

Kilkelly village lies in the barony of Gallen, in the east of County Mayo, a part of Connacht that experienced some of the harshest conditions during the Great Famine of the 1840s. The surrounding landscape is low and boggy, the kind of terrain that defines much of inland Mayo, and the settlement pattern here reflects centuries of small-scale rural life rather than any strategic or commercial importance. The church, as a local place of worship in such a community, would have served a population whose numbers contracted dramatically through emigration and death in the mid-nineteenth century, a contraction from which many such villages never fully recovered. The building stands as a physical marker in a place whose story has otherwise been carried largely through memory and music rather than monument.