Kildare, County Kildare
Photograph: 瑞丽江的河水 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
County Kildare · Leinster

Kildare

Cill Dara

'church of the oak' — St Brigid's foundation

The story

Brigid founded her double monastery of women and men here under an oak in the fifth century, and a perpetual fire burned in her honour until the Reformation; it was relit in 1993 and burns still. The Curragh, the great plain beside the town, has been common grazing and a horse-racing ground for centuries and holds the Irish Derby.

Worth seeing nearby
  • Piper’s Stones, Athgreany · Sixteen granite boulders of a Bronze Age circle, with one stone standing apart to the north-east. Dance here on a Sunday, they said, and you join them: the outlier is the piper, the ring is his congregation, caught mid-reel.
  • Dún Ailinne · The royal site of Leinster: a 13-hectare hilltop enclosure whose vast timber circles were built for ceremonies, then dismantled and burned.
  • Rock of Dunamase · A fortress on a rock over the midland plain, sacked by Vikings out of Dublin in 845. Diarmait Mac Murchada is said to have given it with his daughter Aoife to Strongbow in 1170 — a dowry that helped bring the Normans in. Cromwell’s men blew it up in 1650.
  • Hill of Allen — Fionn's fort · Almu, the white fortress of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. A 19th-century folly now crowns the hill; the quarry has eaten half of it.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.

All towns and cities → · Know Kildare better? Add to the story.