The site at Newtown is now absorbed into an eighteenth-century demesne, its streets and property lines buried under later landscaping. What makes it quietly remarkable is how completely it vanished, and how much of its brief life can still be read in the ground.

The settlement was established by Broghil in the mid-seventeenth century, following the construction of Newtown bastioned fort, a defensive fortification with angled projecting bastions designed to give defenders overlapping fields of fire, built in the early 1650s. The 1659 Census of Ireland recorded 119 inhabitants: 34 English and 85 Irish, a ratio that already suggests a complicated social geography. Two plans from the 1680s survive to document the place at its fullest extent, one being Thomas Phillips's vista of Bantry Bay, the other a French map of 1687 to 1688. Both preserve a settlement that was, even then, probably already in decline. The likely cause was straightforward economic pressure from nearby Bantry, then known as Ballygubbin Towne, which simply outcompeted Newtown into obsolescence. By 1700 it was gone. Excavations in 2000 opened a test trench on the settlement's edge, where geophysical survey had already traced rectangular property boundaries of roughly 20 by 10 metres, connected by lanes or hollow-ways three to four metres wide. Within the trench, the foundations of a timber-framed house came to light, built on wooden sills and roofed in slate. Clay tobacco pipes found in undisturbed deposits dated the structure firmly to the late 1650s and early 1660s, while the pottery recovered was entirely of English manufacture. The building's construction method and its material culture together pointed clearly to English occupants, placing a specific household within the broader colonial project that had brought the settlement into existence in the first place.