Settlement deserted - medieval, Killabban, Co. Laois

No earthworks mark where burgesses once paid sixty shillings annually for their burgage plots, the standard landholding unit in a medieval planned town, and even the motte that once anchored the settlement was levelled by a landowner during land clearance in March 1986. What remains is a field, now planted with coniferous trees, lying between an early church and the spot where that motte once stood.

The story of Killabban begins considerably earlier than its medieval borough. St. Abban is said to have founded a church here in 650, and the ecclesiastical presence persisted long enough to become part of the settled landscape around which the later borough grew. By 1348, the town had functioning civic arrangements, with its burgesses paying a recorded annual rent for their holdings. A decade later, in or around 1358, the settlement was caught up in the regional conflicts of the period, when the Earl of Kildare defended Killabban in wars against the O'Mordha of Slemargy. That military involvement did not save it. The borough declined through the late fourteenth century, and whatever built fabric it possessed appears to have left nothing legible in the ground. Researchers have suggested the possibility that it was a dispersed borough rather than a nucleated one, meaning the settlement may never have been tightly clustered in the first place, which would help explain why so little archaeology survives.

The area most likely to have contained the borough lies in the field connecting the old church to the now-vanished motte. With the motte gone and no earthworks remaining, the site offers nothing visible to the eye, only the knowledge of what was once recorded there and is now lost twice over, first to time and then to clearance.