The square was not an organic growth but a deliberate act, the product of a family's decision to relocate a commercial centre and anchor it to a crossing point on the river.

The Everard family, described by the historian William J. Smyth as entrepreneurial, were responsible for transferring the fairs and markets that had originally been granted to the nearby settlement of Ballyboy to this nodal point on the River Tar, which runs west to east along the northern edge of the village. The settlement expanded westward from the old bridge and inn at the crossing, and by the mid-seventeenth century it was functioning as a genuine market town. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records that Clogheen held a fair twice a year, on Whit Tuesday and on the eighteenth of October, as well as a weekly market every Tuesday, though by the time of that survey even those had been disrupted, removed by order to the garrison at Castlegrace. That detail alone, a market suspended by military command, gives some sense of how thoroughly the Cromwellian period unsettled the ordinary rhythms of Irish town life. By 1667, a fifth of the town's occupiers were New English in origin, and these newcomers accounted for three-fifths of the wealthier two-hearth taxpayers, a snapshot of how plantation-era settlement reconfigured who held economic weight in a place. The town was characterised at that time by its mill, forges, ovens, and kilns, the infrastructure of a working community rather than a merely administrative one, and it later developed further under the O'Callaghan administration into what Smyth calls a small but thriving estate town. The precise boundaries of the late seventeenth-century settlement have not been established, leaving something genuinely open in the archaeological record of this otherwise quietly legible place.