Aerial photographs taken in December 2013 revealed a set of earthworks that appear to mark out the bones of a borough: boundaries running roughly east to west, most likely the outlines of burgage plots (the long, narrow strips of land that medieval townspeople rented for commerce and dwelling), with a roadway cutting north to south through the middle. A market cross base survives at the northern end of these earthworks, the kind of stone plinth that once supported a cross marking the spot where trading was formally sanctioned. The eastern boundaries have been clipped by a modern road, but enough survives to suggest that this corner of south Kilkenny was once a functioning, chartered urban settlement.

The town of Kells and its Augustinian priory, a house of canons following the Rule of St Augustine, were founded together in 1193 by Geoffrey fitz Robert de Monte Marisco. A borough charter followed between 1211 and 1216, and subsequent charters granted by Geoffrey's sons William and John de Monte Marisco extended the privileges of the burgesses further. The town may originally have been organised around a motte, the raised earthen mound characteristic of early Anglo-Norman fortification. What is striking is how turbulent its subsequent history proved. In 1252 it was burned by William de Bermingham. In 1316 Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king Robert I, seized it during his campaign through Ireland. In 1327 it was burned again, this time by the de Berminghams acting alongside the Geraldines. By 1346, the town had passed through yet more violence: its then owner, Eustace le Poer, was hanged for treason, and his property was granted to Walter de Bermingham. A seventeenth-century map produced as part of the Down Survey of 1655 to 1658 records an area known as Common Green lying between what is now the Catholic church and the priory, a faint trace of the civic landscape that once existed here.