It is one of those places where the grid of plantation-era town planning is still legible in the landscape, if you know what you are looking at.

Sir Richard Aldworth obtained his market licence in 1620 and had a market house built by 1622, the kind of deliberate, top-down founding that characterised English settlement in Munster during this period. The town grew steadily, if modestly. The 1641 depositions, legal testimonies gathered in the aftermath of the Irish rebellion of that year, record 25 households, which gives a rare early snapshot of how small and exposed such a settlement still was at mid-century. A century later, the traveller and physician Charles Smith described it as containing "one regular street" with "some well looking houses", a phrase that suggests respectability without extravagance. By 1837, Samuel Lewis counted roughly 246 houses, several of them well built, in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. That arc from a handful of households to a recognisable market town across two centuries is fairly typical of successful plantation settlements, though not all of them survived long enough to follow it. The demesne of Newmarket House lies immediately to the south, and a former parish church on the south side of Church Street marks an earlier focal point of the settlement's religious life.