While the Rock of Cashel draws most attention, decades of archaeological work within and around the town itself have revealed a medieval settlement whose boundaries were surprisingly firm and whose edges were, in some directions, almost completely empty. When pipe-laying and construction works in the late 1990s and early 2000s were monitored by archaeologists, the findings were as notable for what was absent as for what was found. Areas to the east and south of the walled town, including McCann Street and the stretch around The Green, showed virtually no evidence of medieval occupation. The town, it seems, did not spread far beyond its walls.

Cashel's long history as a seat of power reaches back to 370, when it became the principal stronghold of the Kings of Munster. In 1101 it was handed over to the Church by Muircheartach O'Brien, shifting from a royal to an ecclesiastical centre. Control of the town passed back and forth over the following centuries: the Justiciar of Ireland took it from the archbishop in 1218, and it was returned a decade later to Archbishop Marianus Ua Briain with the agreement of Henry III. By 1250 a charter from Archbishop Muirin to the reeve and twelve burgesses points to the town's functioning civic life. Edward Bruce halted his army here in 1316 and held a Parliament at Cashel. The town wall, a defining boundary that would shape settlement patterns for centuries, was built between 1319 and 1324. The Rock itself was burnt in 1647 by Murrough O'Brien, Earl of Inchiquin. What excavations from the 1980s onwards have added to this outline is a finer-grained picture of the town's physical form. A trial excavation in 1988 at the Mitchelstown Co-op complex found a thick occupation deposit running beneath the wall, possibly relating to pre-walled Norman activity. Work near the Friar Street library site found the town wall built over a backfilled ditch nearly two metres deep, with 13th and 14th-century pottery in the fill and a partial human burial at its base. The inner lane off Camus Road, to the west, produced a dense sequence of cobbled surfaces layered with organic dumped material, along with a 7-metre-long medieval wall of uncertain function. To the east and south, almost nothing: the wall, it seems, was a genuine limit rather than just an administrative line.