There are no earthworks, no raised outlines in fields, no obvious sign that the ground beneath the present settlement was once a medieval town with a different name entirely. The absence itself is the curious thing: a place that has been continuously inhabited for centuries, yet has shed every physical trace of its earlier form.

In 1319 to 1320, records mention eleven burgages at a place called Lynan, a burgage being a standard unit of medieval urban tenure, essentially a plot of land held in a town in exchange for rent and sometimes service. Scholarship has identified this Lynan as Newtown, later recorded as Newtown Lower on the 1906 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. By the mid-seventeenth century the settlement appears on the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, that ambitious Cromwellian mapping project which recorded Irish landholding across the country, and it is also mentioned in the Civil Survey of the same period. The Down Survey map shows a church and two houses at the western end of the village, roughly where the present Catholic church now stands, suggesting a degree of continuity in how the settlement was organised even as its population and fortunes shifted. At the eastern end, a ruined thirteenth-century church still survives, its walls a more tangible remnant of the medieval community than anything the surrounding landscape offers. The settlement's gradual transformation, from a place substantial enough to have burgages recorded under the name Lynan, into the quiet village of Faugheen it is today, remains only partially legible from what survives above ground.