Not a hamlet or a loose scattering of dwellings, but a settlement substantial enough to be burned twice within a single decade, to operate a mill, and to appear by name in royal grants more than two centuries after its destruction. Today, nothing of it can be seen above ground.

Athassel Priory itself was founded around 1200 by the Anglo-Norman lord William de Burgo for the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, a religious order whose members lived communally under the Rule of St. Augustine. King John confirmed the foundation in 1205. The town that grew up outside the priory walls was, by all documentary indications, a going concern, until it was burned in 1319 by Lord Maurice FitzThomas and again in 1329 by Bryan O'Brien. Those two burnings, coming so close together, appear to have ended the settlement as a living place. Yet the memory of it persisted in legal paperwork long afterward. A grant issued in 1562 by Philip and Mary to Thomas, Earl of Ormond and Ossory, refers explicitly to the 'lands of the old town of Athasshell', and leases from 1570 and 1582 repeat the same phrase, the Earl apparently continuing to hold title over ground that had been uninhabited for generations. The word 'old' in those documents is doing quiet work; it acknowledges, matter-of-factly, that whatever had stood there was already long gone.

The priory ruins themselves are considerable and are accessible to visitors, but the vanished town occupies the same landscape invisibly. There is no earthwork, no ridge-and-furrow, no above-ground trace to indicate where the medieval settlement once stood. Its presence is now entirely a matter of record rather than ground.