It lies in the sheltered valley of the Eglingham Burn, a tributary of the River Aln, about 100 metres (330 ft) above sea level, in a rural conservation area set amongst rolling countryside, within 5 miles (8 km) of the Cheviot Hills.

The earliest records of human occupation in the parish are finds of neolithic or Bronze Age flint tools, a spearhead, and many burial sites, variously cairns, barrows and cists.

[4] Eglingham colliery closed in November 1897, after becoming unprofitable owing to the costs of removing water from the main coal seams at Black Hill.

The church of St Maurice is a stone structure, rebuilt after the English Restoration, having been destroyed, together with neighbouring chapels, by the Scots during the Rebellion, and was enlarged by the addition of a transept in 1836.

[3] Some time between 1217 and 1226, Richard Marsh, the Bishop of Durham, gave the tithes of Eglingham to the Abbey of St Albans to help the monks make a better ale, "taking compassion on the weakness of the convent's drink", according to an eighteenth-century historian.

The 13th-century parish church is dedicated to St Maurice and may originally have served as a fortified pele tower where the villagers could take refuge from marauding bands of cattle thieves, or Border Reivers.