Qualla: Straffan

Straffan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777, Public domain. In a Middle Irish poem called Lumman Tige Srafain, a warrior named Lumann carries a wonderful shield and dies of his wounds at a place called the House of Srafan. The poem is one of three hundred place-legends collected in the Dinnshenchas Erenn around the tenth century. The house belonged to a saint, Srafan, whose feast day was 23 May in the Martyrology of Tallaght, and the village that grew around the site eventually anglicised his name to Straffan. Today the village has a population of 1,158, more than tripled since 2002, but the older layers are everywhere: a 15th-century parish church ruin in the centre of the village, a chateau-style Victorian mansion that hosts the European Ryder Cup, a steam museum housed in a church carried here from Dublin, and a quiet rail bridge that became the site of an 1853 tragedy still remembered in song.

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Image: Sarah777 | Public domain

Straffan: The Henry Family and Hogarth's Caricature

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC0. The Straffan estate has changed hands often. Maurice Fitzgerald received it from Strongbow himself in 1171. By the eighteenth century it had passed through Suttons, Boules, Talbots and Delaps before Dublin banker Hugh Henry bought it for £2,200 in 1731. Henry's son built a Pallad...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC0

Straffan: Wine, a Chateau and the K Club

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiggingSpace, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hugh Barton bought the burnt-out estate. He was a partner in the Bordeaux wine firm Barton and Guestier, and between 1828 and 1832 he built a new house downriver, designed by Frederick Darley and modelled on a chateau at Louveciennes near Paris. Twenty years later his successors ...

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Image: DiggingSpace | CC BY-SA 4.0

Straffan: The Tragedy at Baronrath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the evening of 5 October 1853, in heavy fog south of Straffan station, the noon express from Cork stalled when its piston rod snapped. A twenty-wagon goods train ran into the back of it at full speed. Eighteen people died - the third worst rail tragedy in Ireland's history to ...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Straffan: A Village of Quiet Survivals

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. About fifty sites of archaeological and cultural interest cluster around the village, from an ancient hill fort to the 1913 Lych Gate that has become the symbol of Straffan. Barberstown Castle, originally raised by Nicholas Barby in the thirteenth century, still stands four and a...

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Image: Ridiculopathy | CC0