It is a quietly practical detail, easily overlooked, but it points to the ambition and social theatre that shaped this corner of Munster in the late seventeenth century, when an English settler family began reordering a landscape that had only recently been taken from its previous owners.

The lands and medieval castle of Cappercullen were granted to George Evans in 1667, following their forfeiture, a common mechanism by which Cromwellian and post-Restoration settlements transferred Irish estates to new proprietors. Evans and his family moved quickly to remake the place. Around 1680, a walled garden was laid out to the west of the old castle. Then, in 1682, King Charles II granted George Evans the younger a royal charter to enclose a deer park of approximately 500 acres across his lands at Cappercullen and Murroe, and the park itself was established by 1683. Deer parks of this scale were markers of status in seventeenth-century Ireland and Britain, requiring not just land but a formal grant of permission from the Crown. The raised walkway connecting the walled garden to the wider demesne served as a boundary feature, preventing the park's deer from wandering into the ornamental grounds. The house that eventually stood immediately to the south-west of the walled garden was built by Lord Carbery in the early eighteenth century, a brick structure that has since been levelled entirely; modern tennis courts now occupy its footprint.

The site today sits within the grounds of Glenstal Abbey, the Benedictine monastery established in the twentieth century on the Cappercullen demesne. The abbey grounds are not a general public amenity, so any visit should take account of the monastic community's routines and any access arrangements in place. Those who do explore the demesne will find the landscape layered in a way that rewards attention: the medieval castle remains to the north-west, the outline of the walled garden survives to the west of it, and the area associated with the deer park lies beyond. The raised walkway, modest as it sounds, is the kind of feature that only makes sense once you know what the enclosure beside it once contained.