What was once a functioning feudal manor, with a castle, a church, burgage plots, and at least one organised roadway, now survives mainly as a series of gentle undulations in the grass. A ringwork, a tower house, a church, and a graveyard remain as the more legible fragments, but much of what the scholar M. J. Lyons mapped in 1937 has since become either invisible or ambiguous. A rectangular enclosure he described as a fort, measuring roughly 112 metres north to south and 64 metres east to west with a ruined rampart nearly four and a half metres wide, has left no trace above ground. A hollow-way, six metres wide and flat-bottomed, which once served as an old roadway running south of the tower house, ends abruptly where a new road was cut in 1939. The old town, in other words, was not so much abandoned as gradually overwritten.

The written record, however, is unusually detailed for a place so physically effaced. Around 1200, the manor was in the hands of Alexander de Worcester, who granted land to a hospital in frankalmoign, a form of tenure by which land was held in exchange for religious services, for the building of a house and mill on the watercourse between the hospital's proposed site and his own residence at Lisronagh. Alexander died without heirs, and the manor passed to the descendants of his brother Philip. By 1333, an Extent shows Lisronagh in the possession of Lady Elizabeth de Burgo, who had inherited it from her brother Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, killed at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. By 1400 the Earl of Ormond had emerged as overlord, with a family called Howet holding the residential lordship of the burgh. In 1402, David Howet is named as an Ormond tenant. By 1530, the Howet castle had been levelled and ruined by Edmund fitz Piers Butler of Dunboyne, and Richard Howet, the then heir, formally granted its site to Peter Butler, Earl of Ormond. The Civil Survey of the mid-seventeenth century still records a castle standing on the lands of Court-Lisronagh, held by Ellyn, Countess Dowager of Ormond, while several members of the Howet family, described as Irish Papists, appear separately as proprietors of smaller parcels in the parish.

The burgage plots that Lyons identified in the field north of the church, three of them running roughly north to south, are the most evocative detail. Burgage plots were the long, narrow strips of land allocated to tenants in a medieval planned town, their dimensions reflecting the commercial logic of the settlement. That they should be visible now only as vague undulations, and that even Lyons' more confident identifications have since faded or been absorbed by field boundaries and roads, gives the site an odd quality: a place that was once carefully planned and legally documented, whose physical form is now almost entirely illegible.