There is little to show for it now: some low earthen banks no higher than half a metre, a church, a graveyard, and a stone-revetted pond to the east. The settlement that once occupied this ground had two names running in parallel, an Irish one that survived and an English one that did not, and it may even have existed in two distinct but closely related forms, one referred to as "Old" and another as "New," though the precise relationship between them has never been established.

The English name, Somerton or Sumertown, appears in a 1363 deed by Gilbert Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, confirming the liberties of the borough. The Irish name, in various spellings ranging from Coilleagh to Cwolaghmore across the centuries, proved more durable. A deed from 1344 records a grant by one Richard Somerton of Tibirken of eighteen acres of arable land and two of wood in the tenement of Old Coylagh, in a field called Fernewhille, suggesting the settlement already had enough internal geography to name its fields. By 1426, the burgagery of Coillagh, a burgagery being a unit of land held by a burgess in a medieval town, was generating a rental of 26 shillings for the Earl and Countess of Stafford, which compared favourably with the 12 shillings coming in from the burgagery of Jerpoint, a well-documented medieval centre nearby. In 1576, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, referred to it simply as "my town of Cowlagh" in his will, leaving it to Patrick Sherlock for his lifetime. Five years later, in 1580/81, an indenture granted the town, along with its castle and associated properties, to Nicholas Quemerford of Mogorban in County Tipperary for a term of twenty-one years at an annual rent of twenty pounds. After that the documentary record thins, and the place fades.

The castle, which appears on the Down Survey barony map of Kells to the south-east of the church, has no confirmed location on the ground today. The medieval settlement is thought to have spread southward from the church into the present townland of Coolaghflags, but the earthworks are subtle and easy to miss. What remains is a landscape that has quietly absorbed several centuries of occupation and left almost nothing legible at surface level.