Beside it, an unnamed well is described only as "supposedly holy", a qualifier that manages to be both cautious and oddly evocative. Together, these modest features are what physically remains of a site that was once, according to medieval sources, a house of Augustinian nuns.

The abbey at Aghade was founded around 1151, according to the Monasticon Hibernicum as quoted by the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, and the founder named is Diarmait Mac Murchada, the King of Leinster whose later invitation to Anglo-Norman forces would reshape Irish history entirely. The house was established for women following the Rule of St. Augustine, one of the reform orders that spread across Ireland during the twelfth-century church reorganisation. By 1549, what was recorded was no longer a religious house but an Aghade Rectory, noted in an inquisition of that year, and the site appears again on the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, the Cromwellian-era land census that documented property across Ireland in considerable detail. What survives above ground now is the bullaun stone, a type of carved rock basin found at many early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland and often associated with ritual or healing use, along with the well and the graveyard that surrounds them.