The modern town absorbed the name but not the site, leaving the older settlement largely in place as a set of earthworks pressed between bogland on either side. What makes this arrangement quietly arresting is how complete the medieval logic of the place still reads in the landscape: a community organised around a crossing point, with the sacred and the secular assigned to opposite banks..

The River Goul acted as an organising spine for the settlement. On its northern bank stood a medieval church and its associated graveyard; on the southern bank, a tower house and its bawn, the walled or enclosed courtyard that typically defended the approaches to such a fortified residence. The two sides were connected by a fording point, a shallow river crossing that served as the settlement's main artery. Earthworks survive on both sides of the river, north of the church and south of the tower house, marking where domestic and agricultural activity once concentrated. The Down Survey, a systematic mapping of Irish land carried out between 1655 and 1656, recorded additional detail for the southern bank: a watermill, the castle, and a structure described simply as a 'Thatcht House', suggesting a settlement that mixed fortified, ecclesiastical, and ordinary domestic elements within a compact area hemmed in by bog.