It had a manor, a weekly Saturday market, and two annual fairs, one on the 22nd of June and one on the 29th of August. A seventeenth-century survey recorded it as the 'Towne of Tyone', complete with the privilege of a Court Leet and Court Baron, the administrative and judicial apparatus of a functioning manorial settlement. Today, almost nothing of it is visible above ground. What remains lies beneath fields clustered around the ruins of Tyone Abbey, a medieval Augustinian house on the southern outskirts of Nenagh, and it took aerial photography, geophysical survey, and careful excavation to begin recovering the shape of what was lost.

Oblique aerial photographs taken in July 1969 first drew attention to a series of linear and curvilinear earthworks in the fields to the north and west of the abbey. Geophysical survey carried out in 2005 by Geoarc Ltd added detail, revealing a complex pattern of enclosures, field boundaries, and curvilinear features, with tentative evidence for sub-circular forms that appeared to predate the main field system. Test excavation followed in late August and early September 2007, directed by Tamás Péterváry of Dominic Delany and Associates. Four trenches were opened, each yielding earthen boundary ditches, burnt areas, and pits. The results pointed to at least two distinct phases of occupation. The earlier phase was represented by a univallate enclosure, the remains of what was probably an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland in the first millennium, from which a fragment of an iron knife was recovered. A second, smaller enclosure was identified by geophysical survey approximately 50 metres to the north and is thought to be broadly contemporary. The later phase was more elaborate: a series of three parallel earthen ditches enclosing what excavators called the 'abbey field', with regularly laid-out internal divisions suggestive of organised settlement activity. The central ditch alone was 3.6 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep, with deposits indicating it had been filled in gradually from both sides.

Earlier monitoring work in 2002, carried out by Niall Gregory during groundworks for a proposed housing development on an adjacent plot, had already uncovered charcoal-rich features and in situ burning in two separate areas of the site. The accumulating picture is of a place occupied across many centuries, from early medieval farmstead through to a formally constituted medieval town with markets and fairs, before it fell silent and the ground slowly closed over it.