Somewhere in the parish of Kilmeadan in County Waterford, a medieval settlement once stood. Nobody is entirely sure where. Archaeological testing carried out roughly 150 metres to the west of the local parish church found no trace of it, and the church itself remains the most plausible candidate for its general vicinity. A place that held a weekly market, passed through the hands of several notable Anglo-Norman families, and still counted 69 inhabitants as late as 1659 has left almost no physical mark on the landscape.

The story of Kilmeadan as a functioning settlement begins at least as early as the reign of King Henry III, who granted it a charter with the rights of Breteuil, a form of borough law that originated in Normandy and was widely applied to Anglo-Norman plantations in Ireland to attract settlers by guaranteeing certain legal protections and trading privileges. By 1282 the manor was in the hands of John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald, and three years later it passed to Walter de la Haye, along with the right to hold a weekly market, a significant economic grant for any medieval community. By the early fourteenth century it had come under the control of the Le Poer family, one of the prominent Anglo-Norman dynasties of Munster, and John, son of Benedict le Poer, was styled Lord of Rathgormuck and Kilmeadan in 1328. That title persisted within the family into the fifteenth century. By 1640, the Civil Survey records Kilmeadan as a manor belonging to John Power of Dunhill, the name having shifted from the Norman "le Poer" to its Hiberno-English form over the intervening centuries. Kilmeadan castle lies about a kilometre to the east, a separate landmark that survives where the settlement itself does not.