A seventeenth-century source recorded the 'Towne of Tyone' as holding a manor with the privilege of a Court Leet and Court Baron, two annual fairs, one on the 22nd of June and one on the 29th of August, and a market every Saturday. That description, cited by Simington in 1934, conjures a functioning local centre with legal and commercial infrastructure. Almost nothing of it is visible above ground today.

The archaeology beneath the surface tells a more complicated story than any single period of occupation. Oblique aerial photographs taken in July 1969 first revealed a series of linear and curvilinear earthworks in the fields around Tyone Abbey, and in late August and early September 2007, a team led by Tamás Péterváry of Dominic Delany & Associates opened four test trenches to investigate. Geophysical survey had identified anomalies in two phases, and the excavation confirmed that the site had seen intensive habitation across at least two distinct historical episodes. The earlier phase produced evidence of a univallate enclosure, that is, a single-ditched ringfort of the kind widely used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or local seat of power, along with a fragment of an iron knife. A second, smaller enclosure was identified by geophysical survey roughly 50 metres to the north, though it was not excavated. The later phase was more elaborate: three parallel earthen ditches, running at intervals of approximately three metres, enclosed what became known as the abbey field. The middle ditch alone was 3.6 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep, its deposits suggesting that it had been filled gradually from both sides. The regularity of the layout and the consistency of the upper fills pointed to simultaneous use, most likely in the high or late medieval period. Taken together, the two phases suggest a site that began as a typical early medieval enclosure and was later reorganised, perhaps in connection with the Augustinian abbey nearby, into something more formally bounded and defensively conceived.