The story begins with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, who foraged in a forested, primeval landscape, and left traces of a campsite on a gravel ridge in Cakestown Glebe, by the River Blackwater. It continues, chapter by chapter, over a span of c. 5,000 years, recording the homes, burial grounds, work and worship of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age communities. It brings us at last to the threshold of history, in the Iron Age/early medieval transition period, when we meet agricultural workers on tillage land in Kilmainham, stoking the cereal-drying kilns that would secure their surplus grain harvest for the winter. Kells was not yet the seat of a famous monastery at that time but had already become a central place in the region, with a tribal capital at Commons of Lloyd, on the hill that overlooks the town today.