A burgage was a plot of land within a borough, held by a burgess in exchange for a fixed rent, and the presence of such plots implies a functioning urban settlement with defined legal status. Yet that one mention is all there is. No physical trace of the plots survives, and the settlement that once warranted a borough charter has left almost nothing visible on the ground.

The place-name itself is thought to derive from the Irish Crodhach, meaning a rounded hill, and the settlement along the Limerick to Tralee road was Anglo-Norman in origin. In 1289 Hugh Purcell, the manor's owner, granted woods and turf from the bog of Moychro to the Bishop of Limerick, and by 1297 he had been granted free warren, the right to hunt small game across his lands. The manor passed briefly to the Crown in 1305 before returning to the Purcells, who held it across several generations. The descent is documented continuously from 1480, running through Thomas, Patrick, Pierce, Edmond, and Piers Purcell, before reaching James Purcell, who married Jane Blayney, daughter of Sir F. Berkeley, and whose brother General Patrick Purcell served as a Confederate leader during the 1641 rising, noted by contemporaries as a brave and humane officer. A 1611 grant allowed Edmond Purcell to formally establish a manor at Croagh with courts Leet and Baron and free warren. By the later seventeenth century the land had shifted through the Walcott and Browne families, and in 1726 a J. Walcott settled the property on Edmund Browne of Ballyslattery in County Clare, following Browne's marriage to Walcott's cousin Jane Westropp of Attyflin. Scholars believe the borough itself was most likely founded in the thirteenth century, since by the sixteenth century the creation of new boroughs had become largely a Crown prerogative.

The most probable site of the medieval borough lies to the south-west of a stepped crossroads at Croagh, north of the Greanagh Stream, where a church and castle once stood. When Samuel Lewis wrote his topographical dictionary in 1837 he recorded forty-six small houses in the area, but even that modest cluster has since dissolved into the surrounding landscape. Visitors approaching along the Limerick to Tralee road will find little that announces former urban ambitions, which is perhaps the point; the interest here lies less in what can be seen than in reading the absence itself against a surprisingly detailed paper trail.