Aglish
An Eaglais, Co. Tipperary

A crossroads that was a church long before it was anything else.

Aglish is a small crossroads in north Tipperary that most people pass without knowing it has a name. It sits 7 km north of Borrisokane, 1 km east of the R438, and has a population in the low two hundreds. The name tells you what it was before it was a village: An Eaglais - the church. The broader civil parish around it is Aglishcloghane, from Eaglais Chlocháin, the church of the stepping stones, and both names point at the same medieval fact.

There were monks here before the Normans arrived. Tradition says the Abbey at Aglish belonged to the Canons Regular of St Augustine, who took over from an earlier Columban foundation sometime in the thirteenth century. By 1841, when John O'Donovan wrote up his Ordnance Survey notes, the abbey was already ruins - and those ruins were already being quarried for the stones of the Protestant church that replaced them. The Board of First Fruits had funded a new Church of Ireland building in 1813, erected beside the old churchyard and the ancient ash tree that was already enormous when the surveyors noted it.

The Catholic parish church of St Michael the Archangel was built later - foundation stone laid in 1891, blessed and opened in 1893. It stands in a village of modest domestic buildings, a former national school (now a community hall), and a pub that no longer sells drink. If you come looking for a lively evening, go to Borrisokane or Terryglass. If you come looking for a place that has been quietly the same thing for eight hundred years, you've found it.