The southern end of Clane, in County Kildare, conceals several centuries of occupation beneath what is now an unremarkable stretch of suburban development. Four castles once stood in and around the town; the Civil Survey of 1654 recorded all four, yet not a stone of any of them remains above ground. That kind of wholesale disappearance is unusual even by Irish standards, and it points to a settlement that seems to have contracted or been largely abandoned before the end of the Middle Ages, leaving the modern town with a street plan whose origins are Norman but whose medieval fabric is almost entirely gone.

The sequence of occupation here goes back well before the Normans. Clane grew up around an Early Christian monastery known as Cluain Damh, and when the Anglo-Norman lords arrived they found a strategically useful river crossing on the Liffey at the town's southern edge. The Barony of Otyny, as it was then called, was granted to Adam de Hereford and passed to his brother Richard; the de Hereford family are thought to have raised the motte that still sits near the river, a motte being a raised earthen mound forming the base of a Norman timber or stone fortification. The town also acquired a Franciscan Friary, a graveyard, and what was reputedly a hospital dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. Gas pipeline work in 1997 turned up pottery sherds of thirteenth and fourteenth century date alongside a Bann flake, a type of flint tool associated with Mesolithic activity, found between the village and the motte. Excavations in 2003 recovered a dressed stone near the Abbeylands housing development, possibly a mullion, the vertical dividing bar of a window, from the Franciscan Friary roughly a hundred metres away. Separate testing at Prosperous Road and Millicent Road that same year produced 115 pottery sherds from the topsoil alone, including Leinster cooking ware, Dublin-type wares in several grades, and a range of post-medieval ceramics alongside clay-pipe fragments, a small material biography of everyday life spanning several hundred years.