Edgeworthstown, Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford

That earlier identity did not survive the century. When the Edgeworth family acquired the lands later in the 1600s, they set about founding a town on the site, and Mastrim quietly disappeared from common usage, replaced by the family name that still appears on road signs along the N4 between Longford and Mullingar.

By 1682, a visitor named Nicholas Dowdall described the place as "a very good Countrey Town which hath a Market and two Fairs", which suggests the Edgeworths had established it with some ambition and reasonable speed. The town continued to develop and rebuild across the following century and a half. When the topographer Samuel Lewis wrote about it in 1837, he counted 167 houses and noted what he called "a neat and improving appearance, the greater part having been rebuilt". The streetscape visible today largely reflects that 18th and 19th century phase of construction, a layered result of successive rounds of improvement rather than any single moment of planning.

What makes the place quietly unusual is not its appearance but its archaeology of names and ownership. The castle associated with the original 1621 grant still has a record attached to it, located in pasture to the north-east of the main road, separate from the town that eventually overshadowed it. The town itself grew up around a transplanted identity, its Irish place-name replaced so thoroughly that Mastrim now requires a little research to recover.