Not a stone of that wall survives. This is Emly, once known in Irish as Imleach Iobhair, and the gap between what the documentary record describes and what the landscape now offers is quietly arresting.

The settlement began as an Early Christian monastery, founded by St. Ailbe, whose feast day falls on the 12th of September. At its height, Emly ranked among the wealthier monasteries in Munster, but its fortunes were worn down across several centuries. The Annals of the Four Masters record that the monastic foundation was pillaged twice and burnt five times between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with an earlier burning in 845. When Cashel was elevated to an archbishopric, much of the territory redistributed came at Emly's expense. By 1215, King John had granted the English bishop of Emly permission to hold an annual fair, and a weekly market was to be left undisturbed, suggesting the town still held some commercial life. In 1303, a murage charter was granted, a murage being a licence to collect tolls from traders in order to fund the construction or upkeep of town walls, which explains the walls visible on that late sixteenth-century map. Between 1505 and 1542, Bishop Thomas Hurley founded a college of secular priests at the cathedral. By 1569 the monastery had been united with the see of Cashel, a merger that further accelerated the town's decline. When the Archbishop of Cashel visited in 1622, he noted two castles, described as the great and the small, one of which had served as the bishop's residence. In 1718 the Catholic bishopric also merged with Cashel, closing off yet another strand of institutional identity. The walls, the gates, the castles, and much of the ecclesiastical infrastructure have since disappeared entirely from the ground.