Geological and historical aspects, each in their own way, govern the landscape of south Tipperary. Great fold arches of the east-west Armorican mountains - nearly 300 million years old - form the backbones of the Galtees, Slievenaman and others of the Munster ranges; they abut the Central Ireland lowlands of flat Carboniferous Limestone. The wild and barren hill ranges lies south, rich agricultural lowlands, deeply spread with glacial deposits to the north. Supported on a conspicuous box-shaped fold in the bedded limestones - an outlier of the major mountain structures - the Rock of Cashel raises its majestic ruins clear of modern Cashel's tasteless scatter of buildings below and dominates the plain.

Cashel, The Stone Fort, was already a royal site of Munster when Patrick visited it in the fifth century. Traditionally, this is where, seeking to illustrate the mystery of the Trinity, the saint plucked the shamrock leaf which has become our national emblem. We are told, too, how during the baptism his crozier accidentally transfixed the king's foot, a trial which the latter bore unflinchingly as he imagined it to be part of the ritual. This became the major centre of the South - both secular and ecclesiastical - and many of its bishops coming from the ruling family of Munster ruled as kings. The opulence of its remains reflects this, and it is in marked contrast to the lonely austerity of our older monastic sites.

The boundary wall of the modern graveyard outlines the ancient stronghold, which became church property in 1101. Its early ruins - the cross, the round tower and the lovely little Hiberno-Romanesque church - date from this century. The more expansive cathedral, archbishop's castle and residence of the attendant clergy (Hall of the Vicars' Choral) are thirteenth century and later. Our view westwards from the precincts atop the Rock is across the rich, grassy farmland with the thirteenth-century Cistercian Hore Abbey nearby; far away, the Galtees, almost blotted out by a summer rainstorm, rise abruptly from the plain.

from the Appletree Press title The Irish Landscape by James C. Brindley