Celbridge

A Liffey town west of Dublin that began as St Mochua's 7th-century church by the bridge, which is what its Irish name means. Speaker William Conolly began Castletown House, Ireland's first and largest Palladian country house, at the end of the main street in 1722, and Swift's 'Vanessa', Esther Van Homrigh, lived at Celbridge Abbey. Richard Guinness ran the town brewery, and his son Arthur, founder of the Guinness brewery, lived with him on Main Street.

Beads and quern stones point to 5,000 years of habitation, and folklore links the area with St Patrick and with St Mochua (c.570). Early in the 13th century the Norman lord Thomas de Hereford built a castle, monastery and mill, and the town of Kildrought grew along one street; in 1314 a man was charged at Naas with breaking into houses there by night and taking geese, hens and beer. The Down Survey of 1654–56 counted 102 people, with the Dongan family holding all the land. Bartholomew Van Homrigh built Celbridge Abbey in 1703, and in 1709 William Conolly bought the Castletown estate, complained that the tenants were all beggars, cleared them, and granted new leases on condition that stone houses replaced the mud cabins.

The name was anglicised to Cellbridge and then, after 1724, to Celbridge; Swift addressed his letters to Vanessa at 'Kildrought' and she replied from 'Celbridge'. The woollen mill, built in 1785–88 and once described as the biggest wool manufactory in Ireland, employed up to 600 people, some of them children, and its closure in 1879 cut the population from 1,674 in 1861 to 811 by 1891. A memorial at the workhouse of 1839–41 marks the burial of between 1,500 and 2,500 inmates during the Famine. After rezoning in 1967 the first Castletown estate homes opened in 1975, and the 1986 census found Celbridge the fastest-growing town in Ireland.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Celbridge ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Taghadoe · round tower · 5 km
• Oughter Ard · round tower · 7 km
• Clondalkin · round tower · 10 km
• Reeves Castle · castle · 4 km
• Maynooth Castle · castle · 6 km
• Rathcoffey Castle · castle · 9 km
• Drimnagh Castle · castle · 14 km
• Ashtown Castle · castle · 14 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Clontarf · Good Friday 1014: Brian Boru's forces break Leinster and Dublin's Vikings — and Brian is killed praying in his tent. Now a quiet seafront suburb.
• Gleann na Smól — Oisín returns · After 300 years in Tír na nÓg, Oisín came home, touched the ground helping men lift a stone, and aged in an instant — to tell Patrick the tales of the Fianna.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.