A small Co. Waterford town that sits quietly in the Bride river valley carries within its street plan the deliberate ambitions of one of early modern Ireland's most acquisitive men. The two intersecting streets that form the core of Tallow are thought to have been laid out by Sir Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, who acquired the settlement in 1604 and set about remaking it according to the logic of plantation-era improvement. By 1608 he had established an iron works here, and by 1613 the town had been incorporated as a borough, complete with a courthouse, a prison, and a market-house. Nothing of that built fabric survives above ground, but the street pattern itself may be the most durable thing Boyle left behind.

The history before Boyle is one of repeated erasure. There are references to a church at Tallow as far back as 1199, possibly on a pre-Anglo-Norman foundation, and by the 13th century there was a substantial settlement, though not one that ever achieved formal town status. In the 14th century the area formed part of Inchiquin manor, which had been granted to the Fitzgeralds following the Anglo-Norman incursions of the late 12th century. By 1587 the place was described as a 'decayed town' when it passed to Sir Walter Raleigh; a decade later it was burned out entirely by Irish forces in 1598, leaving roughly sixty English households to be accounted for in the aftermath of re-foundation. The cycle of grant, neglect, destruction, and rebuilding makes Tallow a peculiarly layered case, a settlement that was effectively started again more than once. Charles Smith, writing in 1746, noted that the town had been defended by earthen ramparts in 1641 during the Confederate Wars, though no trace of any enclosing feature has been found to corroborate this. Two 17th-century graveslabs recorded in the local graveyard, along with the noted ruins of a church, are among the few physical traces that connect the present town to its earlier lives.