The Irish form, Sengualainn, appears to mean "old shoulder", which scholars have read as a reference to the rounded hill on which the settlement sits. That name, and the hill beneath it, are among the few continuities between the place as it exists today and the medieval borough that once occupied, or perhaps once occupied, roughly the same ground. The main street running from north to south-east looks like an ordinary rural thoroughfare, but whether it traces the line of its medieval predecessor is genuinely unknown. The current layout is more likely post-medieval in origin, laid out after a long period in which the settlement may have been entirely abandoned.

The earliest written record of Shanagolden appears in the Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, a twelfth-century account of the Viking wars in Ireland, which places a battle here in 968 between Mahon, king of Munster, and the Norsemen of Limerick and Waterford. In the Anglo-Norman period the lands passed into the hands of the diocese of Limerick, and sometime between 1225 and 1250 Bishop Hubert de Burgh granted them to the canons and vicars of St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick. Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it functioned as an episcopal manor, a landed estate administered on behalf of a bishop. A rental document from 1336, preserved in the Black Book of Limerick, records that the burgesses of Seanguala, as it was then spelled, paid one hundred shillings annually to the bishop, a detail that confirms the settlement held borough status. After that entry, the documentary record goes silent, and the presumption among archaeologists is that Shanagolden followed the fate of many Limerick boroughs, quietly emptied out during the upheavals of the later Middle Ages.

The village lies about twenty miles west of Limerick city on the Foynes road, close to the Shannon estuary. There is nothing obviously dramatic to signal its layered past; the interest here is interpretive rather than monumental. The Urban Archaeological Survey of County Limerick, compiled by John Bradley, Andrew Halpin, and Heather A. King for the Office of Public Works in 1985, remains the principal source for understanding what the settlement may once have been. Visitors inclined to read the landscape should pay attention to the hill itself, the feature that apparently gave the place its name over a thousand years ago, and consider that the street they are walking may have no direct connection to the medieval town recorded in that single surviving rental from 1336.