The settlement that once occupied the slopes just above the 300-foot contour at Modeshil has vanished entirely from the surface, leaving only a medieval church, a graveyard, and a tower house to mark the fact that people once lived here in some number.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest to establish land ownership across Ireland, recorded the site with unusual plainness: a thatched house with a chimney and twelve cabins, noted without any improvement. The landowners at the time were James Tobyn of Killaghey and Pierce Butler of Callin. The Down Survey, the great cartographic project of the same period directed by William Petty, depicts a church and three dwellings positioned to the east, south, and south-west of the central cluster. These two surveys together give a glimpse of a small, modest community organised around the older medieval nucleus of the church and a tower house, the latter being a fortified residential structure common across late medieval Ireland, typically several storeys of stone construction serving both as residence and as a means of local defence. What the surveys cannot tell us is how far back the settlement stretched, or how densely it was occupied in earlier centuries. The precise boundaries of the medieval phase remain unknown.

What makes Modeshil quietly unsettling is the completeness of its disappearance. The church and graveyard survive, as does the tower house, but the houses themselves left no visible trace at ground level. Visitors to the site today would find pasture where a community once kept its twelve cabins, with nothing to indicate where walls stood or lanes ran.