Low mounds, faint traces of foundations, and the ghost of an ancient street pattern are all that remain above the surface of what was once a functioning Anglo-Norman borough, known variously as Nova Villa, Newtown d'Erley, Villa Erley, and half a dozen other variants in the Latin and French of medieval administration. A hollow-way, the sunken trace of a heavily used road worn down over centuries of foot and cart traffic, runs roughly north to south immediately east of the graveyard for around 180 metres before bending south-west towards a stream feeding the Kings River. A geophysical survey has traced plot boundaries extending east and west from it, and a rectangular parcel of glebe land recorded on the first Ordnance Survey map of 1839 aligns precisely with those buried boundaries, suggesting the medieval street plan quietly persisted in land use long after the town itself had ceased to exist.

The settlement began its documented life around 1200, when Baldwin de Hamptonsford granted the chapel of Nova Villa, described at the time as already functioning as a mother church, to the priory of Kells in Ossory. Shortly after, the manor passed to John d'Erley, granted to him by William Marshal, most likely when d'Erley accompanied Marshal to Ireland in 1206 or 1207. The d'Erleys held it for well over a century and a half, and the Red Book of Ossory places their castle at what is now known as Castle Eve, about a kilometre south-west of the settlement. Their tenure came to an end in the late fourteenth century in circumstances that are rather unusual for a landowning family: a descendant had been captured while campaigning in Spain, and the manor had to be sold to raise the ransom. The property then moved through several hands, with deeds in the Ormond archive showing grants to Thomas de Ferrars in 1388 and to James Butler, Earl of Ormond, in 1391, even as other sources suggest the Sweetmans were established as lords of the barony of Erley by 1478. The Sweetmans were still in possession when Cromwellian confiscations in the mid-seventeenth century broke up the estate entirely. Throughout those centuries the borough generated a small but telling archive: deeds record neighbours named Joy, Somerton, and le Whyte transferring messuages, crofts, and single acres of arable in a field called Langelaunde, the texture of ordinary commercial life in a settlement that has since dissolved almost completely back into farmland.