The name itself, Aglish, simply means "church" in Irish, eaglais, which tells you something about how central this site once was and how thoroughly that centrality has since faded.

The ecclesiastical history of the place is genuinely tangled. The parish church of Minard appears in the Papal Taxation List of 1302 to 1307 for the diocese of Ardfert, and by 1633 it was under the patronage of the Earl of Orrery. Local tradition, recorded by Windele in 1848, held that the church whose foundations were once visible here dated only to the mid-seventeenth century and had been relocated from somewhere else, possibly after the destruction of nearby Minard Castle in 1650. One theory suggests that Kilmurry was the original parish church and that ecclesiastical functions shifted to Aglish after that destruction. A contrary view, put forward by Hickson in 1888, holds that a thirteenth-century parish church stood at Aglish all along, and that Kilmurry was only built after 1307 when Aglish had grown too small or too decayed to serve the district. Neither argument has been settled. What is certain is that the site is far older than any of these medieval disputes: two ogham stones, the carved alphabet used in Ireland from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries, were recorded here, both dating to the fifth or sixth century. One remains in situ beside a tomb. The other, inscribed with a Maltese cross, was removed to the National Museum of Ireland.

A 2010 survey by Laurence Dunne found seventy-six above-ground tombs, of which twenty-nine were named and forty-seven unnamed, along with thirty-six unmarked graves indicated only by unhewn local sandstone. Only four inscribed headstones from the twentieth century were recorded. The graveyard sits at around 100 metres above sea level, raised noticeably above the roadside, and is enclosed on three sides by a low dry-stone wall, with modern galvanised gates at the entrance. During the same survey, a previously unrecorded cross-slab came to light: a small rectangular stone covered in white lichen, lightly incised with an equal-armed cross. It sits in a place that has been accumulating layers of use, abandonment, and reuse for over a millennium and a half, most of it unannounced.