Today Askeaton passes easily as an ordinary market town on the road between Limerick city and Foynes, yet its modest streets conceal a layered past that stretches from a medieval Irish fort to a parliamentary borough that endured until the Act of Union in 1800.

The name itself carries a clue to the place's origins. According to the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the early twentieth century, Askeaton likely derives from Eas Gephtine, meaning Gephten's Cascade, a reference to a waterfall on the Deel. The Book of Rights, compiled around 1100, mentions the fort of Geibtine on a river island here, and it was that same island, easily defended, that drew William de Burgo to fortify the site for the Anglo-Normans in 1199, an event recorded in the Annals of Inisfallen. By 1300, listed as the "town of Inskefty," it was contributing forty shillings to a military subsidy in aid of Edward II's Scottish campaigns, which implies it was already an incorporated settlement of some standing. The town passed into the hands of the Earls of Desmond in the mid-fourteenth century and remained one of their principal residences for two hundred years. Gerald, the fourth earl, founded the Franciscan Friary in 1389, and the ninth earl oversaw much of the castle's construction after 1459. The Elizabethan wars brought destruction: an English force under Sir Nicholas Malbie sacked the town and burned the friary in 1579, though the castle held out until the following year, when it fell to Pelham, the lord justice. After Sir Francis Berkeley was granted the castle and forty acres in 1610, the settlement was formally incorporated in 1613 with a charter establishing a sovereign and twelve free burgesses. The castle was slighted, that is, deliberately rendered indefensible, by Axtell in 1652, after which the town largely faded from the historical record.

Askeaton sits on the N69 between Limerick and Foynes, and the castle island is visible from the road. The medieval settlement's precise layout remains uncertain, but archaeologists suggest it was centred around the castle and parish church near Church Street. The seventeenth-century borough appears to have developed linearly along Main Street, and the Quay and the Square are thought to date from the same period, as do some of the long, narrow property plots along Church Street that are still legible in the streetscape today. The friary ruins and the castle remains are accessible on foot and reward a slow look, particularly for anyone interested in how a place's bones outlast its politics.