Samuel Lewis noted as much in 1837, recording the presence of extensive building remains discovered at considerable depth in the adjoining fields. Above ground, a cluster of old churches still stands on the south side of the road, the visible remnant of a place that was, at various points in its history, a major monastic centre, an episcopal manor, and a functioning borough with its own market and burgesses paying rent to the bishop of Limerick.

The name Mungret is thought to mean something like 'bog or sedgy morass of the sloping hill', which gives some sense of the landscape before it became a place of ecclesiastical importance. The monastery here was apparently founded in the sixth century by St Nessan, and by the mid-eighth century its abbots were being recorded, a sign of its standing in north Munster. It was raided repeatedly between the tenth and twelfth centuries, and in 1152, at the Synod of Kells, the monastery put forward a claim to be recognised as an episcopal seat, arguing on the basis of its historic role as the principal church of the diocese of Limerick. The claim failed, undermined largely by its closeness to Limerick city itself. At the close of the twelfth century, the land was granted to St Mary's, Limerick, by Domhnall Mor O Briain, and Mungret passed into the estates of the bishop. Under the Normans, it functioned as an episcopal manor and was granted the right to hold a weekly market in 1225. A rental of the manor from 1336, preserved in the Black Book of Limerick, records the burgesses paying £4 10s. annually to the bishops for their landholdings. By 1463-4, the borough had been granted the laws of Breteuil, a standard set of borough customs widely adopted across medieval Ireland and England. What happened to it after that is not clearly documented, though it is likely the settlement declined, as so many small medieval boroughs did, through the famines and disturbances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The site today is centred on the surviving churches south of the Foynes road, and the medieval borough is thought to have extended to the north of this cluster. There is no dramatic ruin marking the spot where the town once stood; the archaeology is largely beneath the surface, which is itself part of what makes the place worth pausing at. The churches provide a legible anchor point, and the fields around them carry the quiet suggestion of something much larger underneath.