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County Kildare · Leinster

Maynooth

Maigh Nuad

plain of Nuadha, from Maigh Nuadhat; the article takes Nuadha as one of the gods of the ancient Irish, while Joyce, following O'Donovan, takes the name from Nuadhat, a king of Leinster

👥 17,259 (census 2022) 🏔 County Kildare Source: Wikipedia ↗
The story

A university town in north Kildare, home to Maynooth University and to St Patrick's College, Ireland's only Roman Catholic seminary, and seat of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference. Maynooth Castle at one end of the main street and Carton House at the other were seats of the FitzGeralds, later Dukes of Leinster, and the castle was overrun in 1535 after Silken Thomas's rebellion. In term time the town's population nearly doubles.

County Kildare through the ages →
The history of Maynooth

Maynooth was long a centre of the Geraldines, or FitzGeralds, who dominated Irish affairs in the Anglo-Norman and Tudor periods, and it lies just inside the western edge of the Pale. Its castle was a stronghold of Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare, better known as Silken Thomas, and was overrun in 1535 after his rebellion. Pugin designed the 'new range' of St Patrick's College in 1850, and J.J. McCarthy's College Chapel was finished in 1894. The town pound, where stray animals were held, has walls built in 1822, though the pound is older. From 1932 to 1937 the Governor General, Domhnall Ua Buachalla, whose family ran a hardware shop in the town until 2005, made Maynooth his unofficial home rather than move into the Viceregal Lodge.

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

Castles and monuments within 15 km

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

Worth seeing nearby
  • Hill of Tara · Seat of the High Kings, with the Lia Fáil that cried out under a rightful king — and, in 1899, holes dug by British Israelites hunting the Ark of the Covenant.
  • Tara — the Lia Fáil · The Stone of Destiny, one of four treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, which roared beneath the foot of every rightful king of Ireland.
  • 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.

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