These enclosures, typically formed by a raised bank and outer ditch, were the fundamental unit of early Christian religious life in Ireland, separating the world of prayer and learning from the surrounding farmland. That one survives here, even partially, points to a history of organised religious activity in this corner of Kilkenny that preceded the Anglo-Norman reorganisation of the Irish church by many centuries.

The place-name itself is suggestive. Killarney derives from the Irish Cill Áirne, meaning the church of the sloe or the church by the sloe-trees, and the "cill" element, a borrowed Latin word for cell or church, is one of the most reliable markers of early ecclesiastical settlement in the Irish landscape. Where the name survives attached to a piece of ground, there is usually something beneath or within that ground to justify it. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this type are generally associated with the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when Irish monasticism operated under a distinctive structure quite different from the continental model, with the enclosed settlement functioning as a self-contained community rather than a single church building serving a parish.