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County Kildare · Leinster

Newbridge

Droichead Nua

the new bridge; the Irish form, now the official name, was introduced in the 1930s, and a 1752 map already marks 'The New Bridge' here before the town existed

👥 24,366 (census 2022) 🏔 County Kildare Source: Wikipedia ↗
The story

Kildare's second-largest town grew up in the 19th century around a cavalry barracks on the Liffey, and for a hundred years the soldiers' custom kept it going. When the cavalry left in May 1922 the town went into decline, but it has grown again since the 1960s as a shopping and commuter town. Its industries have included Irish Ropes, Curragh Tintawn Carpets and Newbridge Silverware, and Bord na Móna has its headquarters here.

County Kildare through the ages →
The history of Newbridge

Great Connell Priory was founded nearby in 1202 by the Augustinian Canons, but the town itself is much younger. The traveller John Dunton mentioned Newbridge in 1698 without describing any settlement apart from Ballymany. A Catholic mass house stood beside the bridge from about 1730, and the New Bridge Inn was there by 1750. When floods carried away the first bridge in 1789, William Chapman, an engineer on the Grand Canal extension to Naas, rebuilt it the following year on a new site and brought the high road across it along what are now Main Street and Edward Street.

The modern town really began with the cavalry barracks, and Main Street took shape while it was being built; from 1819 a run of cavalry regiments was stationed here. Growth quickened after the Curragh Camp opened in 1855, when Eyre Street and Edward Street were laid out, the second named for Prince Edward, then stationed on the Curragh. The railway arrived in 1846 and churches followed in 1819, 1828 and 1852. The town prospered until the cavalry withdrew in May 1922 with the founding of the Free State, declined for a time, and has grown steadily since the 1960s.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Newbridge ↗, 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
  • 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.
  • 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.

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