In most planned Anglo-Norman towns of the thirteenth century the parish church occupied a central or at least enclosed position, so this placement is genuinely anomalous, and it quietly signals how the town's layout departed from the standard template.

Buttevant was a de Barry foundation. In 1234 David de Barry obtained a licence for a weekly market and annual fair at his town, and by the end of the thirteenth century it had burgesses, the class of freemen whose presence marks a functioning medieval borough. By 1310 the de Barrys had secured a murage grant, a royal licence to collect tolls specifically for building or maintaining town walls, suggesting the settlement was prosperous enough to justify that investment. The town's plan was straightforward: a single linear main street running between a bridge to the north and a castle to the south, with two cross-lanes near the Franciscan friary. A rental document of 1364 already names 'Main Street' and 'Mill Lane', showing the street pattern was established and recognised in legal records. Despite all this, the town suffered considerable devastation during the fifteenth century and never fully recovered its earlier standing. By 1831, Samuel Lewis could describe it as consisting principally of one main street along the old mail coach road, with 204 houses, which is not so different from the medieval arrangement.

The physical fabric of that long history is still legible along Main Street. Lombard's Castle fronts onto the western side, and an eighteenth-century market house stands at the southern end, a reminder that the town continued to function as a modest commercial centre even after its medieval decline. The Awbeg River runs along the western edge of the town, the same river that Edmund Spenser wrote about in the 1590s from his nearby estate at Kilcolman, which places Buttevant at the edge of a landscape that accumulated layers of history with unusual density.