And yet a town is clearly what it became: roughly forty houses arranged along a main street, mills operating by the 1640s, a seventeenth-century church, and a grid of neatly equal-sized plots that can still be traced on the Ordnance Survey map of 1835. The whole settlement grew up not from any official civic foundation but simply because Sir Frederick Hamilton had built a castle nearby, and people followed.

Hamilton established his castle in the early seventeenth century, and the community that gathered around it had the character of a fortified frontier settlement, comparable in layout to Jamestown in County Leitrim. The planned core of the town, roughly 290 metres along its longer axis and extending south-east from the Owenmore River, had a Court House at its western end and a Market House towards the east, beside the original church. By around 1659 the population counted twenty-one heads of household. A star-shaped fort, the kind of angular defensive earthwork designed to deflect cannon fire rather than simply resist it, overlooks the town from the north, though it was not added until the eighteenth century. What makes the settlement quietly puzzling is the almost complete absence of physical evidence for its earliest occupation. Archaeological investigations near the castle and behind properties on the main street, as well as at the south-eastern edge of the town, have turned up nothing that can be confidently dated to the seventeenth century. The town that Hamilton effectively conjured into existence has left almost no trace in the ground.