The Church of Ireland building occupying the northern half of the enclosure sits on or very near the site of the ancient parish church of Aghern, meaning the ground beneath a relatively modest nineteenth-century structure has almost certainly been a place of worship and burial for centuries before any of the surviving headstones were cut.

The oldest readable memorials here date from the 1760s, placing the graveyard's documented use in the era of the Penal Laws and their gradual relaxation, when Church of Ireland parishes were consolidating their hold on older ecclesiastical sites across Munster. The graveyard measures roughly sixty metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, a compact but not insignificant plot sitting close to the bridge that carries the road along the western edge of the site. The parish of Aghern is one of those quietly persistent medieval ecclesiastical units that survived the upheavals of the Reformation largely by having its physical infrastructure absorbed rather than abandoned, and the continued, if occasional, use of the burial ground means it has not entirely passed into the category of the purely archaeological.