St Canice himself, the sixth-century monk from whom both the cathedral and the city take their names, is said to have founded a monastery on this elevated ground above the River Nore. The round tower beside the cathedral, one of only two in Ireland that visitors can still climb, predates the Gothic structure beside it by several centuries, and its presence signals that the site was already well established long before the Normans began work on the stone cathedral in the thirteenth century. The gardens and grounds occupy the same enclosure that would have surrounded that early monastery, a roughly circular arrangement known in Irish ecclesiastical archaeology as a temenos or sacred precinct, shaped by centuries of use rather than any single act of planning.