The Nore bisects Kilkenny from north to south, flowing through Ballyragget, Kilkenny City, Bennettsbridge, Thomastown and Inistioge before joining the Barrow at New Ross. The Barrow forms most of the eastern boundary. The Suir runs along the southern edge, dividing Kilkenny from Waterford. Together the Three Sisters give the county both its productivity and its trade routes: barges still drift north from the Barrow up to the Shannon system, and the deep-water port at Belview, on the Suir Estuary, gives an inland county access to the Atlantic. Highest ground is Brandon Hill at 515 metres, in the south near Graiguenamanagh, but most of the county sits low between hill ranges - the Slieveardagh Hills to the west, the Castlecomer Plateau to the north. The middle, around Kilkenny city, is flat and warm and fertile, which is why the thermometer at the castle, that June afternoon, climbed where it did.

Before Kilkenny was Kilkenny it was Osraige - the kingdom of the deer people, an ancient Gaelic territory that existed from at least the second century until the thirteenth. The Mac Giolla Phádraig family, ancestors of the modern Fitzpatricks, ruled here, and Cill Chainnigh - the church of St Canice - was their chief stronghold. Osraige sat between Leinster and Munster as a buffer kingdom, sometimes attached to one, sometimes the other, with the Slieve Bloom Mountains as its northern frontier. The hill fort at Freestone Hill, four kilometres from Gowran, has produced Roman finds, and a Roman-style burial at Stoneyford dates to the first century AD - hints that Osraige was already connected to the wider world long before Christianity arrived. St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny City stands on the saint's foundation, and its round tower, one of only a handful left standing in Ireland, is climbable to this day.

In 1170, Richard de Clare, second Earl of Pembroke - the Cambro-Norman lord known to Irish history as Strongbow - married Aoife of Leinster the day after he and his men took Waterford. He had been promised her hand and the succession to Leinster by her father, Dermot MacMurrough, in exchange for military help against Dermot's enemies. The marriage stuck, and so did the conquest. Kilkenny passed into the Lordship of Leinster and then, in 1391, into the hands of the Butler family - James Butler, third Earl of Ormond, who bought Kilkenny Castle and held it as the Butlers' seat for five hundred years. The Butlers built castles across the county. The Purcells did the same. The Shortalls and the Cantwells the same. By the late Middle Ages, Kilkenny was as densely fortified as any county in Ireland, every minor lord checking every other across the limestone fields.

Jerpoint Abbey, founded around 1180 near Thomastown, sits among the best Cistercian ruins in Ireland - its cloister carvings, especially the tomb of Bishop Felix Ua Duib Sláin, are among the finest medieval stone sculpture in the country. Kells Priory, fifteen kilometres south of the city, is locally called Seven Castles for the tower houses spaced along its enclosing walls; the fortified appearance is what gives it the look of a stronghold more than a monastery. Duiske Abbey in Graiguenamanagh - founded in 1204 by the Cistercians and named for the Duiske, the dark water - still dominates the centre of the town. The Black Abbey in Kilkenny, founded in 1225, is Dominican. Together they make Kilkenny one of the most concentrated zones of monastic architecture in Ireland.

Walk into a Kilkenny village pub on a championship Sunday in summer and the air is hot and loud and devoted to one sport. The Kilkenny hurling team, in black and amber stripes, has won the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship more times than any other county - the gap is large and persistent. Hurling, the fastest field sport in the world, is played with curved ash sticks and a small leather ball; men strike it from the air at speeds that make the spectator wince. The county is dotted with clubs in nearly every parish, and the school St Kieran's College in Kilkenny city has won more All-Ireland college finals than any school in Ireland - 26 senior titles, with the next-best counting well behind. The county has its own dialect words for the game's small movements, and its own theology of disappointment when the team falls short.

Until the 1930s, Irish was still spoken natively in pockets of County Kilkenny - the last of the southern Leinster Irish-speaking communities. The dialect, part of the wider Ossory Irish, had one striking peculiarity: slender R was pronounced as a sound close to the French G in regime, which Irish phoneticians transcribe as a palatal fricative. Pádraig Paor, who lived in Baile Shéamais near Glenmore, was the last known native speaker of County Kilkenny Irish. In 1936 the Irish Folklore Commission recorded his speech for posterity. Paor died in the 1940s. Most of Kilkenny's older speech survives now only in those acetate discs, in placenames, and in the village of Glenmore, where some householders still know how to say it the old way.