What makes this early incarnation quietly remarkable is how complete a settlement it already was: the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1659 record not just the cabins but a ruined castle, a church, an orchard, a garden, and a mill, all gathered to the east of a river that formed the boundary between townland and parish. A bridge crossed that river too, suggesting the place was already a node of movement rather than a purely local affair. The cluster sat in roughly the same position as what is now the modern Main Street, meaning the bones of the town were laid down long before it acquired its familiar name.

The formal origins of Skibbereen as a market town trace to Sir Walter Coppinger, who secured the right to hold a fair in the area in 1615. The town as it developed brought together two originally separate settlements, Bridgetown to the west and Creagh, also known as Staplestown, to the east, divided by a small stream and belonging to distinct parishes. Its position on the southern bank of the Ilen river proved commercially useful: goods could travel downstream to Baltimore Harbour, and corn and flour were exported from there. Wool and linen manufacture made the town an important textile centre for a period, and an extensive brewery established in 1809 supplied the wider region alongside the weekly markets, which were noted for their plentiful provisions. From the nineteenth century onwards, Skibbereen became the cathedral town of the diocese of Ross, a role it still holds.

What lingers about Gortnaclohy is the gap between its documentary presence and its near-total disappearance from public memory. The ruined castle noted in the seventeenth-century terrier is recorded separately as an archaeological feature, as are the church and the mill, but the settlement name itself has been entirely absorbed by the town that grew over it. The Down Survey, a mapping project undertaken on behalf of the Cromwellian administration to catalogue confiscated Irish land, is the principal surviving witness to what Gortnaclohy looked like before Skibbereen's later commercial expansion reshaped the landscape around it.