The present-day town of Kilfinnane, a quiet enough place in the Ballyhoura foothills of County Limerick, sits almost exactly where that earlier settlement stood, its streets quietly overlaying a pre-1700 townscape that few passing through would have cause to consider.

The documentary record reaches back at least to 1252, when a reference to Richard Tancard and the free tenants of Kylfynan places a named community here during the Anglo-Norman period. By 1350, Walter Purcell held the settlement from John fitzPeter Le Poer, Baron of Dunhill, a Waterford lordship, and the fact that Le Poer's heirs were recorded as being under age at the time offers a small human detail in an otherwise administrative account. The 1654 to 1656 Down Survey, a large-scale land mapping project carried out under Cromwellian administration, recorded the castle standing beside a medieval road and close to the ruins of the church and its glebe land. At that point the property was held by Sir Edward Fitz Harris of Castleoliver, described in the Civil Survey as an Irish Papist, a designation with direct consequences in the confiscations that followed. The Survey's description of his holdings is unusually vivid: two ploughlands, a castle with an iron gate, mills, a Court Leet and Court Baron (local administrative and judicial functions), and that busy rhythm of weekly markets and twice-yearly fairs.

The interest for a visitor lies largely in the layering itself. The Down Survey parish map, held at the National Library of Ireland as MS 718, suggests that the present Main Street may follow the line of the medieval road shown beside the castle, meaning the everyday act of walking through the town traces a route that predates the seventeenth century. The castle site and the church ruins are recorded in the archaeological inventory under separate reference numbers, and though the fabric of both is fragmentary, their positions relative to the street plan are worth reading against the historical record. No specialist knowledge is needed; a copy of the Down Survey map and a little time spent comparing its outlines to the modern streetscape is enough to make the ordinary feel considerably less so.