At its centre is a triangular market square, the kind of feature that archaeologists and historians recognise as a signature of Anglo-Norman town planning, along with the particular arrangement of streets, bridges, and public buildings that cluster around it. There is even a reference in the historical record to the settlement having been surrounded by walls, though whether Chapelizod ever formally functioned as a borough remains uncertain; researchers compiling the Urban Survey of County Dublin concluded in 1998 that the evidence was not conclusive enough to include it.

The origins of organised settlement here reach back to the early thirteenth century. The lands were initially held as Crown property and leased by King John to a Richard de la Felde, making this one of the earlier documented Anglo-Norman settlements in the county. Grants of the manor, lands, mills, fisheries, and weirs appear in the record from that period, suggesting a place of some economic importance, positioned as it was on the Liffey with its potential for water-powered milling and river fishing. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 describes a modest but established village: ten slated houses, a number of thatched ones, a church, and, notably, what the survey calls a ffayre Mansion House belonging to Sir Henry Power of Valentia. In 1671, a Colonel Laurence received a grant of several houses in the village, suggesting ongoing interest in the settlement as property worth acquiring and holding.

The triangular market square is still legible on the ground and is the most immediate way to read the medieval logic of the place. The church, whose origins are documented from the thirteenth century, also survives as a focal point of the village. Chapelizod is accessible by bus from central Dublin and sits just inside the boundary of Phoenix Park, so a visit can easily be combined with the park itself. The village is compact enough to read on foot in an hour or so, and it rewards the kind of slow looking that notices how a street bends, or why a square takes the shape it does.