Two monuments remain upstanding, a motte and a church, and together they mark the outline of a medieval settlement that was once substantial enough to have its own reeve, its own court summonses, and its own market regulations, all now largely forgotten beneath the ordinary quiet of the south Tipperary countryside. A motte, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a raised earthen mound, typically constructed by the Normans as the base for a timber or stone tower, and it served as the focal point of early Anglo-Norman lordship in newly acquired territories.

The manor itself was granted to William de Burgh around 1192, in the wave of Norman settlement that followed the invasion of Ireland. By the 1230s, his successor Richard de Burgh had secured the right to maintain warrens, enclosed grounds for breeding small game, within his demesne at Kilsheelan. In 1281, that same Richard de Burgh exchanged the manor for lands in Ulster, and it passed to Otto de Grandison as a reward for services to the king. The documentary record that follows gives a surprisingly vivid picture of a functioning town: in 1345, a plot of land was granted to Adam de Maydwell on a parcel lying between the town cemetery and the River Suir; in 1359 the reeve and community were fined twenty pence for breaching the assize of bread and ale, the medieval regulation governing the weight and price of bread and the quality of ale; and seventy-three years after that, the townspeople were summoned to the Seneschal's Court in Clonmel. By 1570, individual tenements within the town's fields were being granted under names like 'Gareynyvonisioge', and the rectory was passing to Sir Thomas Butler, suggesting the settlement had by then been absorbed into the broader framework of Tudor administration in Munster.