What it conceals is considerably stranger: a settlement that was, in a very real sense, erased and then rebuilt from scratch, and which may never have been formally walled at all, despite being treated for centuries as a town of some consequence.

The earliest firm traces of Mallow as a functioning urban place are a murage grant of 1286, murage being a tax levied to fund the construction or maintenance of town walls, though there is genuine scholarly doubt as to whether walls were ever actually built here, and a reference from 1298 to the burgesses of the town. By that point the manor was held by the Fitzgeralds of Desmond. When a survey was carried out in 1584, it found nine settlements within the manor, all described as lying waste; four contained some trace of habitation, but none was called Mallow, and the site described as containing a great town went by the name of The Shorte Castell. The town was effectively refounded under the Munster Plantation, the Elizabethan colonisation scheme that resettled parts of the province with English settlers after the Desmond Rebellions. By 1611, twenty-five settlers held houses and gardens in Mallow, and by 1641 the town had grown to nearly 200 houses, thirty of them described as stone-built, strong, and slated. The following year, 1642, the town was set alight in several places and suffered considerably, yet it endured; a 1659 population count recorded 463 people. In later centuries Mallow found a different kind of identity as a spa town and market centre. Two houses on Davis Street, demolished in recent times, offered a rare glimpse into the construction methods of the rebuilding era: their internal walls were found to consist of timber uprights set roughly a centimetre apart, packed with mud infill and fixed with timber laths, a technique more reminiscent of earlier vernacular building than the composed Georgian facades the town projects outwardly. Archaeological investigation at the eastern end of town found nothing dateable earlier than the late seventeenth century, which fits the pattern of a settlement that was, to all practical purposes, started again.