For several centuries it was known not as The Naul at all, but as the vill of Cruys, or Cruicetown, the settlement of a single Anglo-Norman family whose grip on the land shaped everything from its fields to its church. The Dublin Record of Monuments and Places listed the site in 1998 as a medieval village, one whose physical form, a cluster of buildings around a castle, a church, and a mill, can still be traced in outline even if little of the original fabric survives above ground.

The Cruise family appear in the record as early as 1185, when there is a reference to "Stephen de Crues's vill" in the barony of Balrothery West. By 1292, when Robert de Cruys of the Naul died, a formal inquisition was held into the extent of his estate. The document recorded 87 acres of arable land farmed by tenants paying twelve pence an acre per year, along with the advowson of the local church, meaning the right to appoint its clergy, valued at ten marks a year. The settlement at that point was already an organised manorial unit with working farmland and an ecclesiastical presence. By 1641, when the Civil Survey captured a detailed snapshot of Irish landholding on the eve of the Cromwellian upheaval, Christopher Cruise of the Naul was recorded as an "Irish Papist" holding 250 acres. On those acres stood an old castle, a hall thatched with straw, an orchard, a garden plot, and ten tenements, the whole estate valued by the jury at one hundred and seventy-five pounds. The lands functioned as a manor, holding a Court Leet and Court Baron, the local judicial and administrative assemblies typical of medieval manorial governance.

The village today sits in quiet north Dublin countryside, and the medieval layers are best approached with a copy of Rocque's 1760 Map of County Dublin to hand; the map, digitised by Trinity College Dublin, shows the settlement's footprint at a point when its medieval arrangement was still broadly legible. The ruins of the castle and the church remain as physical anchors for the old settlement cluster, and the relationship between those two structures and the surrounding land gives a clearer sense of how a medieval Irish vill was actually organised than many better-known sites. The area is accessible by road, and the landscape is unhurried enough to reward a slow look around.