County Kildare Guide (Cill Dara)
“The Lilywhites” - in the province of Leinster. County town: Naas.
Horse country - home of the Curragh and the National Stud.
Just west of Dublin, Kildare is horse country - flat, green and home to the Curragh plains, the National Stud and a racing tradition that runs deep. It mixes commuter towns with monastic heritage (St Brigid founded her great church here) and grand estates like Castletown House, Ireland’s largest Palladian country home.
Horses and saints have shaped Kildare in equal measure. The county takes its name from Cill Dara, the church of the oak, where St Brigid founded her great double monastery in the 5th century, and her perpetual flame has been rekindled in Kildare town in modern times. Just outside the town stretches the Curragh, a vast unfenced plain of short grass grazed by sheep for millennia and galloped over by racehorses for centuries; all five Irish Classic flat races are run at its racecourse, and the Irish National Stud and Japanese Gardens lie on its edge at Tully.
Flat, fertile and threaded by both the Grand and Royal Canals, Kildare was long the breadbasket and thoroughfare of Leinster, dominated by the FitzGerald earls whose power once rivalled the Crown's. The Bog of Allen spreads across its west, while the east has become Dublin's busiest commuter belt, anchored by Intel's enormous campus at Leixlip and the university town of Maynooth. Celbridge holds Castletown House, Ireland's grandest Palladian mansion, and Athy's Shackleton Museum honours the county's polar explorer son. Few counties blend big-house heritage, working bogland and world-class bloodstock quite so seamlessly.
Cities, towns and villages in Kildare
- Naas - The county town, whose Irish name Nas na Riogh means meeting place of the kings, once a seat of the kings of Leinster.
- Newbridge - Kildare's largest town, built around a 19th-century cavalry barracks and now famous for Newbridge Silverware.
- Kildare - A cathedral town founded on St Brigid's 5th-century monastery, with a climbable round tower and the National Stud on its doorstep.
- Maynooth - A university town containing both Maynooth University and St Patrick's College, once the largest Catholic seminary in the world.
- Celbridge - A Liffey-side town dominated by Castletown House, Ireland's finest Palladian mansion, and the boyhood home of Arthur Guinness.
- Leixlip - A Viking-named town, from the Norse for salmon leap, where Arthur Guinness first brewed and Intel now runs its vast European campus.
- Athy - A Barrow-side market town with a striking Dominican church and a museum devoted to Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
- Monasterevin - A canal town of bridges and aqueducts once home to poet Gerard Manley Hopkins on his retreats, and to tenor John McCormack at Moore Abbey.
- Kilcullen - A bridge town on the Liffey close to Dun Ailinne, the ancient royal ceremonial site of Leinster.
- Kilcock - A canal-harbour town on the Royal Canal, birthplace of the emigrant poet Teresa Brayton.
Famous people from Kildare
- St Brigid - One of Ireland's three patron saints, who founded her renowned monastery at Kildare around 480 and whose feast day is now a national holiday.
- Arthur Guinness - The founder of the Guinness brewery, born near Celbridge in 1725, who first brewed at Leixlip before moving to St James's Gate.
- Ernest Shackleton - The Antarctic explorer, born at Kilkea near Athy in 1874, celebrated for the heroic rescue of his entire Endurance crew.
- Christy Moore - The folk singer and Planxty and Moving Hearts founder, born and raised in Newbridge.
- Luka Bloom - The singer-songwriter born Barry Moore in Newbridge, younger brother of Christy Moore.
- John Devoy - The Fenian organiser from Kill who spent decades in America masterminding support for Irish independence, including the Catalpa rescue.
- Silken Thomas FitzGerald - The 10th Earl of Kildare, whose dramatic 1534 rebellion against Henry VIII ended the FitzGerald dynasty's dominance and his own life.
- Damien Rice - The internationally successful singer-songwriter behind the album O, raised in Celbridge.
- Teresa Brayton - The Kilcock-born poet of the diaspora, best remembered for the emigrant ballad The Old Bog Road.
Did you know?
- The Curragh's roughly 2,000 hectares of unfenced short grass form one of the largest areas of semi-natural grassland in Europe, with racing recorded there for centuries.
- All five Irish Classic flat races, including the Irish Derby, are run at the Curragh racecourse.
- Castletown House in Celbridge, begun in 1722, was the first and is the largest Palladian country house ever built in Ireland.
- St Patrick's College, Maynooth, founded in 1795, grew into the largest Catholic seminary in the world during the 19th century.
- Leixlip takes its name from the Old Norse for salmon leap, one of the few Irish town names of purely Viking origin.
- Intel's Leixlip campus, opened in 1989, is one of the largest private investments in the history of the Irish state.
- The Japanese Gardens at Tully, created between 1906 and 1910, are regarded as among the finest of their kind in Europe.
- Kildare means church of the oak, from the oak tree beside which St Brigid established her monastery.
Surnames from Kildare: Bermingham · Aylmer · Behan · Carey · Ennis · Woulfe