Not a hamlet or a cluster of cottages, but a named settlement substantial enough to be listed alongside its castle in a formal royal grant. Nothing of it survives above ground today.

The reference appears in a document recording the extensive manorial lands and properties in Aughrim, Co. Galway and Burrishoole, Co. Mayo that James I granted to Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde. Among the entries is a phrase that raises more questions than it answers: "the castle and town of Carrickowla and four quarters of land adjacent." Carrickowla, or Carrigahowley, is the name by which Rockfleet castle was also known, a tower house, meaning a tall, defensible stone residence of the kind built widely across late medieval Ireland, typically associated in this area with the powerful Burke and O'Malley families. The 1612 grant implies that by the early seventeenth century the castle sat at the centre of a functioning settlement of some kind, one with enough recognised identity to be named in legal proceedings. Whether that settlement was already in decline by then, or whether it disappeared in the decades that followed, is not recorded. Its nature, its extent, and the people who lived there remain entirely unknown.