What makes this one at Garranbane unusual is the layers of dispossession folded into its walls. It sits within the demesne of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, a Benedictine monastery better known today for its school and liturgical music, yet the garden itself predates the abbey by centuries and carries the marks of a much older and more turbulent landscape.

The story of this patch of ground passes through several hands in quick succession. The lands of Cappercullen were part of the estate of Conogher mac Edmund mac Lysagh O'Mulrian before 1604, when Theobald Baron Bourgh of Castleconnell was granted the castle and lands. By 1641, a Colonel Pierce Walsh of Abbeyowney was recorded as proprietor, holding 261 acres of profitable land and a further 33 acres of bog. Walsh's tenure did not survive the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century: the castle and lands were forfeited and in 1667 granted to a George Evans. It was Evans who, around 1680, built the walled garden to the west of the medieval castle of Cappercullen. A generation or so later, Lord Carbery constructed Cappercullen House immediately to the south-west of the garden. That house, an eighteenth-century brick building, has since been levelled entirely; modern tennis courts now occupy its footprint.

The garden lies within the grounds of Glenstal Abbey, which means access is shaped by the abbey's own routines and any visiting arrangements in place at the time. The medieval castle of Cappercullen, to whose west the garden was deliberately positioned, is a separate recorded monument on the same demesne, so those with an interest in the broader archaeology of the site have reason to look beyond the garden walls. The absence of Cappercullen House is worth bearing in mind: where an eighteenth-century brick residence once stood close to the garden's south-western edge, there is now simply open ground and a tennis court, a quiet demonstration of how thoroughly a building can vanish while the older garden enclosure beside it survives.