Newtown Forbes in County Longford is precisely this sort of place: a settlement with an origin story rooted in colonial land grants, a moment of violent destruction, and then a long, unhurried process of rebuilding that left it looking, to the casual eye, like any other modest Irish estate village.

The village was established in 1622 by Sir Arthur Forbes, who received lands in Longford as part of the plantation of the county, a systematic process by which the English Crown redistributed Irish land to loyal settlers in the seventeenth century. Within sixty years, it had evidently grown into something considerable. A 1682 account by Nicholas Dowdall described it as a handsome town of fine stone houses, with a large church sumptuously adorned. That church and much of the settlement were destroyed in 1690, when the village was attacked and set on fire. What visitors see today is largely the product of eighteenth and nineteenth-century reconstruction: a roughly north-to-south street with dwellings on either side, and a Church of Ireland church at the southern end. Castle Forbes, the seat of the founding family, sits about a kilometre to the north-west, the demesne's low-lying pasture still separating the great house from the village it generated.