Demesne graveyards of this kind occupy a peculiar position in the Irish landscape: neither fully public nor entirely forgotten, they often mark the convergence of medieval ecclesiastical sites, later estate boundaries, and the layered burial practices of communities whose records were imperfectly kept even when they were kept at all.

Kilfane itself has a documented medieval past. The name derives from the Irish "Cill Pheáin", meaning the church of St Fán, pointing to early Christian settlement in the area. The demesne is associated with the Cantwell family, Anglo-Norman settlers who held lands here from the thirteenth century, and later with the Power family. The locality is perhaps best known for Cantwell Fada, an effigy figure housed in the ruined medieval church nearby, one of the largest and finest of its kind surviving in Ireland. That church ruin and the graveyard associated with the demesne exist in close proximity, the burial ground reflecting centuries of use that predates the formal landscaping of the estate that grew up around it in later centuries.

The graveyard sits within a landscape that was substantially shaped in the late eighteenth century, when Kilfane became known for its pleasure grounds, including a romantic glen and cascade developed around the 1790s. That designed landscape and the older burial ground occupy the same estate, which gives the site an unusual quality: the deliberate aesthetics of Georgian romantic gardening arranged around, and in some tension with, ground that communities had considered sacred long before any landscape designer arrived.