The place was Carrig, and by 1307 it had all the hallmarks of a functioning Norman town without ever quite becoming one in the formal sense. A burgess, in this context, was a property-holding townsman who paid rent to the lord in exchange for trading rights; a settlement of that scale would have stretched considerably along the ridge running south from the ringwork castle, a ringwork being a type of early fortification consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch rather than a stone keep. That ridge is now sliced through by modern road infrastructure, and the town itself has no monument, no ruin, no marker.

The castle at the heart of this settlement was known in Latin documents of 1231 to 1234 as the 'castrum de Karrich', and a deforestation charter from those same years mentions an associated deerpark lying between Carrig and Wexford town, a name preserved today in the nearby townland of Park. By 1323 to 1324, only a generation after the town appears most prosperous in the records, an inquisition found the castle vacant and roofless, its hall and chapel open to the sky, and three burgages without tenants. The decline accelerated further: an inquisition of 1420 records that the castle and its mill sites had been 'destroyed and burnt by Irish enemies and rebels' and were worth only ten shillings yearly. The two mills, probably sited on a small stream forming the boundary with the townlands of Park and Ballyboggan, vanish entirely from the record by the Civil Survey of 1654. The ferry lasted longer, running until a bridge was constructed at the end of the eighteenth century. As for the castle itself, the antiquarian J. Hooker, writing in Holinshed's Chronicles of Ireland in 1587, described it as having begun in rods and turf before being rebuilt in stone, and noted that it had since been 'pulled down, defaced and raced, and so dooth still remaine'.

Archaeological work has at least confirmed that something substantial lies beneath the modern landscape. Testing on the eastern side of the N11 uncovered a large ditch and pits containing medieval pottery, and a remote sensing survey identified extensive subsurface features across the area. Two ring-ditches among them hint that the site was in use long before the Normans arrived, a suggestion reinforced by the earlier discovery of a pit burial containing a collared urn, a type of ceramic vessel associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. The full extent of the medieval town remains unknown.