Theobald Walter was not a small man in his world. His brother was Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the most powerful churchmen in the Angevin Empire - the man who effectively governed England for Richard the Lionheart while the king was crusading and being held for ransom. Theobald himself was the first chief butler of Ireland, an office that gave him - and his Butler descendants - a hereditary right to a tax on every cask of wine landed in Irish ports. The Butlers would become Earls and then Dukes of Ormonde, ruling vast tracts of Munster and Leinster for the next six centuries. In 1205 Theobald was at the beginning of that long ascendancy. Founding a monastery was both pious and practical - a guarantee of prayers for his soul, a strategic settlement in a wild upland, a confirmation of his lordship over the river valleys north of Limerick city.

The foundation charter, transcribed in later memorials, lays out the boundaries with the patient precision of a medieval surveyor. The grant ran north of the Mulkear by the river Clodach to where it falls into the Mulkear, then up to Ballyvara and Killinagariff, then along the same river to the hill country and around the mountains, descending to lake Grean, then back along the river issuing from that lake to the abbey itself. To the south of the river it included a knight's fee called Dromelia and the land north of the Mulkear called Ballyguy, plus a town-lot in Limerick city to be held by burgage. The monks received the full medieval jurisdictional package: sac and soc - the right to hold trials and impose fines - tol and them, infangthef and outfangthef - the right to try robbers caught inside their own territory and outside it - and the right to hold trial by combat, by fire (red-hot iron), or by boiling water. They could erect gallows and pillories. Their men were exempt from custom, bridge-toll, market rent, and forest dues throughout Theobald's land.

The cantred - the medieval Irish territorial unit, roughly equivalent to a small county - that Theobald gave to the abbey was already divided by Gaelic family. The charter speaks of "Uaithne O'Cahalan" and "Uaithne O'Cliach" - two branches of the local Gaelic ruling families, the O'Cathalans and the O'Cliachs (the latter possibly the family later anglicised as Clay or Cleary). What the Cistercians built here was a Norman ecclesiastical institution dropped into a fully Gaelic landscape. The monks would have spoken Norman French among themselves and Latin in their offices; the local people spoke Irish; the charters and rentals were drawn up in Latin and later in English. The graveyard at modern Abington - the hamlet's name itself a corruption of Abbey-Town - still preserves traces of the architectural footprint. The boundaries described in the 1205 charter are, the antiquarians established, almost identical with the boundaries of modern Abington (Murroe and Boher) parish.

In the early fourteenth century the abbey held property as distant as Athnid parish in Tipperary. It survived the Black Death, the Norman decline, and the long Gaelic resurgence of the fifteenth century. What it did not survive was Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Around 1563 Queen Elizabeth I granted the abbey and all its possessions to a Captain Walshe, who built a new house near the old monastic buildings. The Walshes held it as part of the Elizabethan resettlement of Munster. In 1609 Sir E. Walsh conveyed part of the lands to Sir Richard Boyle - the same Richard Boyle who was simultaneously buying up Lismore Castle and the rest of Walter Raleigh's south Munster estates and turning himself into the wealthiest man in early seventeenth-century Ireland. The Walshes kept some of the property, but lost it again in the great forfeitures that followed the Catholic uprising of 1641. The estates returned to the Crown, then passed through the usual chain of post-Cromwellian planters.

There is no abbey to visit. The medieval church and conventual buildings were progressively dismantled across the centuries - some stones reused in farmhouses, some in field walls, some quarried away. What survives, in the small graveyard in the hamlet of Abington just south of Murroe in east County Limerick, are traces of the architectural layout: foundations, fragments of carved stone, the outline of walls beneath the turf. The Cistercians chose this site for its quiet water and good pasture, and the landscape is much the same now as it was when Theobald Walter granted it: the Mulkear running past, the rolling foothills of the Slievefelim Mountains rising to the north, the wooded valleys spreading west toward Limerick city. The charter that founded Wothney is still extant, in copies and in published memorials, with all its terror of judicial fire and water reduced now to a curious medieval Latin text. The monks are seven hundred years gone. The river still runs.