The Latin phrase "Ecclesia Combusta", meaning the burnt church, appears alongside the older Irish forms "Kiltranyn" and "Kiltranen" in the Red Book of Ossory, the medieval register of the diocese of Ossory, and by 1374 at the latest the English translation of that description had simply become the place's name. Burnchurch, in County Kilkenny, is therefore a settlement defined not by what was built but by what was destroyed.

The question of exactly when, and by whom, the burning took place has occupied local historians for over a century. Writing in 1906, Commins pointed to two candidate events: Palm Sunday 1316, when Edward Bruce swept through Kells during his turbulent Irish campaign, or November 1327, when, according to the Annals of the Franciscan friar John Clyn, Lord Bermingham and the Geraldines burned almost the entire barony of Kells. Either occasion would fit. Before any of that, the parish had been appropriated to the Priory of Kells by one Maurice, son of Maurice, during the episcopate of Hugh de Rous, who held the see between 1202 and 1218. The church itself was dedicated to St. Dallan, or Dallawn, whose feast day fell on the 31st of July. It survived the medieval period, was converted to Protestant use at the Reformation, and then deteriorated so severely that it was abandoned in 1800 and demolished in 1810 to make way for a Church of Ireland building on the same site. That replacement church is now itself a roofless ruin.

The graveyard that surrounds the ruin preserves some earlier material worth seeking out. Two medieval graveslabs survive on the site, along with the mensa, the flat top slab, of a sixteenth-century chest tomb. Chest tombs of this period were substantial stone structures, typically raised on carved supports, and the survival of even a single element gives some sense of the ambitions of whoever commissioned it.