The foundations of somewhere between fifteen and twenty rectangular structures, together with the traces of their connecting roadways, sit quietly in the fields. Lidar imaging, which uses airborne laser pulses to strip away vegetation and reveal buried surfaces, shows these outlines with striking clarity, though on the ground they read as little more than gentle swellings in the turf.

The story of the settlement is bound up with both Anglo-Norman ambition and later Gaelic patronage. A castle was established here in the late thirteenth century, and a passage in the fourteenth-century Irish text Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, a chronicle of the wars of Thomond, places the founding of a settlement at 1277 and refers, a few years later, to 'the round-towered stone-substantial town of Quin.' The castle's ruins were eventually absorbed into the fabric of Quin Friary itself, which was built on top of them after 1433. When excavations were carried out in 2017, one of the houses uncovered to the south-west of the abbey measured roughly 6.4 metres by 4.7 metres, with walls nearly 1.7 metres thick, a central hearth identified by a patch of oxidised soil, and a doorway opening onto the adjacent roadway. Animal bone found in quantity suggested ordinary domestic life. A radiocarbon date obtained from an animal tooth found beneath the metalled road surface gave a range of 1441 to 1631. The town, in other words, was flourishing at the same time the friars were building. When the friary was dissolved in 1541 and its grounds were surveyed for new owners, the document recorded, alongside the ruined church and steeple, a ruinous water mill and ten cottages in 'Queyn village.' Whatever momentum the settlement once had was clearly already fading by that point. A rectangular feature known locally as 'The School,' lying about fifteen metres east of the abbey, was also excavated, and a field system near St Finghin's church to the north may represent a further area of occupation. As one researcher put it, the earthworks serve as evidence of a probable market town that flourished within a Gaelic lordship, even if its original impetus was Anglo-Norman.