Jerpoint Newtown

The medieval "lost town" of Jerpoint Newtown, near Kilkenny, Ireland was mapped a few years ago using Lidar technology. The resulting image, as you can see, reveals the house plots of the town, the mill race, and other features.

That, plus some old maps, made it possible to make this detailed plan of the town as it existed in its heyday (click to enlarge). The town was founded around AD 1200, one of hundreds of Newtons, Villa Novas, and Villeneuves founded all over Europe during the great medieval expansion of the 11th to 13th centuries. The founder was a Norman nobleman named Griffin fitz William, a tenant of William Marshal, the Earl of Pembroke; the old Irish name of the place comes down to us as Cantred Knocktopher. The town was near to Jerpoint, a large Cistercian abbey, and a bridge over the River Nore. (Jerpoint would mean "Nore Bridge" in Norman French.) The population was about 500 at its peak. This was a "borough" despite its small size because it had a regular market and its inhabitants were free. It seems to have shrunk after the Black Death but hung on until after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, when it was gradually abandoned.

The notion of "lost towns" carries with it an important fact about Europe: continuity of settlement has been so strong for the past thousand years that most medieval towns and villages are still inhabited, leaving archaeologists to focus their attention on the handful of places that have been abandoned.

A bit of surviving stonework from the ruined abbey.