Where a medieval borough once functioned, the fields give little away. What survives is a motte, a castle site, and the remains of a church, clustered together as if marking the outline of something that quietly ceased to exist sometime after 1331.

The place-name itself carries an older charge than its Norman history. Pallas Grean derives from Palis Greine, meaning "the mansion of Grian," an allusion to pre-Christian sun worship, and the site is mentioned under the name Grian in the Vita Tripartita, an early medieval Latin life of Saint Patrick written around 900, as well as in an annalistic entry for 914. After the Norman arrival, it passed through the hands of the bishops of Emly before being granted in 1233 to Maurice FitzGerald. The following year, FitzGerald received the right to hold an annual fair at the manor, a standard mechanism for generating income from a developing settlement. A formal survey of the manor made in 1331 recorded that the earl of Kildare held twenty burgages, a burgage being a standard unit of urban property in a medieval borough, normally worth four pounds and four pence per year. By that point, however, the survey noted they were wasted and destroyed by the Irish, and that no buildings remained except the motte. The borough does not appear in the record after that date.

The site sits in the locality known as Cloghaderreen, and the three recorded monuments, the motte, the castle, and the church, are the principal points of orientation for anyone trying to read the landscape here. A motte is an earthen mound, typically raised by Norman settlers as the foundation for a timber tower, and its survival where everything else has gone gives a sense of how thoroughly the rest of the settlement has been absorbed back into the ground. There is no surface evidence of the former streets or plots. Visitors approaching from Limerick city along the Tipperary road should expect a quiet agricultural setting with little interpretive signage; the interest lies in knowing what the empty fields once contained.