That name is Bawnakilleen, from the Irish bawn na cillín, meaning the field of the killeen or little church. A killeen in Irish tradition typically refers to a small, often informal burial ground or chapel site, and the word alone carries a quiet weight, pointing to a presence that left almost nothing visible behind.

The local tradition was recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, in his substantial history of the diocese of Ossory. He noted that the circular enclosure, resembling a rath (a type of earthen ringfort associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland), was said to mark the spot where the ancient church once stood. What is striking is how thoroughly this site slipped from the official record. Neither the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, nor the revised edition produced between 1899 and 1900, makes any indication of a church here. By the time cartographers were systematically documenting the Irish landscape, the structure, if there ever was a standing one, had already vanished so completely that it left no mark even on paper. What survived instead was the earthwork, the field name, and the memory carried in the local tradition that Carrigan thought worth setting down.