The place was called Limerick, not to be confused with the city in Munster, and by the time those words were written it had already been through a remarkable sequence of prosperity, violence, and slow forgetting. What remained underground, on a gentle south-east-facing slope in County Wexford, was only properly investigated in 2012 and 2013, when geophysical surveys and archaeological testing revealed between eight and nine burgage plots, the rectangular land units typical of a planned medieval or early modern settlement, as well as earlier curvilinear ditches beneath them.

The settlement owed its existence to Sir Laurence Esmonde, a member of the prominent Esmonde family of Johnstown Castle who distinguished himself from his Catholic relatives by remaining a loyal Protestant. He was appointed one of two Commissioners for the Plantation of Wexford in 1611 and sat as an MP for the county in 1613. In return he received grants of roughly 5,500 acres centred on the townland then known as Lemmeneagh, which became Limbrick or Limerick. By 1621 he had built a castle there, and the manor soon acquired the right to hold courts, weekly markets, and an annual fair. The settlement that grew up around it was evidently busy enough before 1641: a list of those suspected of rebellion that year includes two innkeepers, a gentleman, and a merchant from Limerick itself, along with a tailor and a cook from the neighbouring townland of Coolnagloose. Sir Laurence, who was also Commander of Duncannon Fort from around 1603 until his death in 1645, managed to muster 140 men, mostly tenants, for the castle's defence at the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion. The bitter irony was that his own son, Sir Thomas Esmonde, sided with the rebels and held the castle before burning it himself at the approach of Oliver Cromwell in 1649. The Civil Survey of 1654 recorded it as already ruined. Sir Thomas forfeited his lands, which eventually passed to the Duke of Albemarle, confirmed in possession by 1668. Yet the community did not immediately disappear: a 1659 census recorded 11 Englishmen and 55 Irish still living there, and four fairs continued to be held into the nineteenth century. The final blow came not from war but from eviction. In 1837, with a hundred inhabitants still on the site on the eve of the Great Famine, the village was cleared.

Below the surface, the rectangular field where the settlement once stood, roughly 250 metres east to west and 100 metres north to south, still holds earthen banks visible at ground level, as well as the subsurface traces mapped by magnetic gradiometer and earth resistance surveys in 2012. A small circular feature recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map may mark a tower associated with the settlement's defences, though this has not been confirmed. Local tradition had always placed the village between the castle site and the old church, and the archaeology has largely borne that out.