That claim, recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, sounds improbable today, where nothing marks the spot except the quiet border country between Kilkenny and Laois. Yet aerial imagery has revealed at least five parallel linear plots in the field to the north of the river, each around 140 metres long and 13 metres wide, aligned on a northeast-southwest axis. These dimensions are consistent with burgage plots, the long narrow strips of land that medieval lords assigned to tenants in planned market towns, granting them the right to trade in exchange for rent. Their presence suggests that something considerably more organised than a farmstead once occupied this ground.

The historical context points to the early thirteenth century. The scholar G. H. Orpen, writing in 1909, identified Castlemarket as the likely caput, or administrative centre, of a sub-manor called Rosconnell, itself held within the larger signorial manor of Odagh. Before 1209, these lands along the Ouveg were in the hands of William de St. Leger. The settlement sat close to Rosconnell church and was associated with both a castle and a motte, the latter being a raised earthen mound on which a timber or stone fortification would have stood, a form introduced to Ireland by the Normans in the decades after 1169. Carrigan placed the Court House field, which preserves the tradition of civic importance, on the north bank of the river, with the castle and motte positioned on the south bank opposite. That arrangement, a fortified residence overlooking a planned commercial settlement across water, is a pattern found elsewhere in Anglo-Norman Ireland, though the particular circumstances that led Castlemarket to shrink into obscurity remain unrecorded.