Qualla: Castledillon, County Kildare

Castledillon, County Kildare: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is almost nothing left to see. A pile of stones in a small graveyard. One weather-pitted headstone for a fifteen-year-old girl named Ann Spellicy, dead in August 1758. A hollow in the ground where a medieval tower house once stood, scavenged for its stones two centuries ago. Yet Castledillon, a civil parish on the banks of the River Liffey near Straffan, carries a name that reaches back to an early Christian hermit and a story that runs through Norman knights, English colonial pardons, a Williamite war, the famous Sarsfield clan, and a First World War firing range where homesick Tommies sang about Kaiser Bill. The fields look empty. They are not.

Castledillon, County Kildare: The Hermit's Place

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before any castle, there was a hermitage. The old Irish name Disert-Iolladhan - Iolladhan's hermitage, sometimes anglicised as Disertillan - belongs to a priest who walked these riverbanks in the sixth century. Iolladhan, according to the genealogies preserved in the Martyrology ...

Castledillon, County Kildare: A Tower Falls Stone by Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1271 a Norman lord named William de Mandesham took possession of these lands, and by the early fourteenth century the de Hereford and Rochford families had raised a tower house on the site. It was a working castle, not a romantic ruin, controlling a slice of country between Du...

Castledillon, County Kildare: The Friar in the Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the ruins one object survived intact, and it left Castledillon for the visitor centre in Kildare town. The Castledillon Friar's Stone is an incised slab carved with the figure of a priest. His left hand holds a reliquary on a chain. His right rests palm-down on his chest. T...

Castledillon, County Kildare: The Butts and the Ballad

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Castledillon's last act of public history came during the First World War. The British Army leased a stretch of McKenna's land called "The Butts" and turned it into a firing range. Recruits drilled in the mud, far from the streets of Dublin or the villages of Leinster they had le...