Qualla: Celbridge

Celbridge: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cill Droichid - the church of the bridge - is what the Irish called this place, and the bridge over the Liffey has been the hinge on which Celbridge has turned for fifteen centuries. Beads and quern stones in the National Museum mark five thousand years of human work on these riverbanks. By the fifth century there was a church at the confluence; by the thirteenth, a Norman castle and mill; by the early eighteenth, Bartholomew Van Homrigh had built Celbridge Abbey beside the river, and his daughter Vanessa would soon be exchanging letters - and something more - with Jonathan Swift. By 1762 a young man named Arthur Guinness was working in his father's brewery on Main Street. And by 2022, twenty thousand six hundred and one people called Celbridge home, the third-largest town in County Kildare.

Read more: Celbridge on Qualla

Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Celbridge: From Kildrought to Celbridge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. The town's old name, Cill Droichid or Kildrought, lasted as long as the medieval order it described. After 1724 the spelling began to drift toward Celbridge. Swift, stubborn in his correspondence, kept writing Kildrought; Esther Vanhomrigh, his beloved Vanessa, signed her replies...

Read more: Celbridge on Qualla

Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Celbridge: Guinness Before the Stout

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cougzie, Public domain. Number 22 Main Street, where Conolly's land agent George Finey had once lived, was for a time the home of Richard Guinness. Richard married Elizabeth Read, of the Bishopscourt brewing family and an aunt of Arthur Guinness, and in 1722 he took over the town brewery and moved it to...

Read more: Celbridge on Qualla

Image: Cougzie | Public domain

Celbridge: The Mill That Fed and Failed the Town

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1785, Lady Louisa Conolly built the Manor Mills beside the river. It was extended in 1805 by Laurence Atkinson, who went bankrupt in 1815, and then run by the Houghtons of Yorkshire, who told a parliamentary committee that this was the biggest wool manufactory in Ireland. When...

Read more: Celbridge on Qualla

Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Celbridge: The Workhouse on the Maynooth Road

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. Built between 1839 and 1841 at a cost of £6,800, Celbridge workhouse was designed to hold 519 people drawn from a region of 25,424. When the Great Famine arrived in 1845, the building filled past breaking. A site beside the workhouse memorializes between 1,500 and 2,500 inmates w...

Read more: Celbridge on Qualla

Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0