Kildare Heritage Trails

White's Castle, a well-preserved 16th-century tower house guarding the Barrow crossing, the ruined Anglo-Norman Woodstock Castle, the Shackleton Museum tracing Athy's deep connection to the polar explorer, and St Michael's Old Cemetery — 4 stops through a River Barrow market town.

Visit the museum housed in Mary Leadbeater's own home and the nearby meeting house, both markers of Ireland's only planned, permanent Quaker settlement.

From a Wednesday market square to a ruined woollen mill, a flood-scarred Liffey bridge, and a pair of granite crosses older than the Normans — a short walk through thirteen centuries of one small Kildare town.

A Norman motte turned Jacobean stronghold and ancestral seat of the family that became the Dukes of Wellington, the mythic hill of Sídhe Neachtain with its Bronze Age barrows, a ruined medieval chapel and Colley family mausoleum, Trinity Well — traditionally the source of the River Boyne — and the historic crossroads village itself, once served by its own railway station.

A round tower built backwards from every other in Ireland, door at ground level and set to the north of its church, and the Franciscan friary founded on lands Strongbow granted after the Norman invasion — a parliament once met within its walls.

Castletown House, Ireland's largest and finest Palladian mansion, its eccentric Conolly's Folly obelisk, the multi-storey Wonderful Barn built as a famine-relief project, and Celbridge Abbey, home to Esther Vanhomrigh — Jonathan Swift's "Vanessa" — 4 stops through a Liffey-side Kildare town.

A short loop around Clane's historic river crossing, from a legendary king's motte and a ruined 13th-century Franciscan friary to a Victorian road bridge and Main Street's Gothic Revival Catholic church.

From St Coca's 6th-century foundation and its ruined medieval church to a market cross buried for safekeeping in 1798 and not restored until 1999, with a Royal Canal harbour that connected the town to Dublin from 1796.

A hilltop round tower and high crosses that survived Viking raids and an 1798 battle, overlooking the ceremonial hillfort where the Kings of Leinster were made kings.

A short, honest tour of a Barrow-valley village best known today for Kildangan Stud — from the site of a dynamited Anglo-Norman castle, past a Gothic-towered parish church and a vanished Edwardian railway halt, to a GAA ground named for the family who built the stud. Note: the stud itself is a private, working farm — this trail views it from the public road and covers what's genuinely open to visit.

St Brigid's Cathedral on the site of her 5th-century monastery, one of Ireland's tallest round towers, the Fire Temple where a perpetual flame was tended by Brigidine nuns for centuries, the ruins of a 13th-century Franciscan friary, and the modern flame relit in Market Square in 2006 — 5 stops through one of Ireland's most important early monastic towns.

A short loop around Ireland's highest village, from a Hospitaller knights' castle and its Romanesque church ruins to a boundary line of the medieval Pale and a burned-out RIC barracks.

Leixlip Castle, a National-rated Norman fortress with roots to 1172 and home to the Guinness family since 1958, a mid-18th-century bridge over the Liffey's salmon leap, a historic riverside inn, and the childhood home of Samuel Beckett's mother — 4 stops through Leixlip.

Maynooth Castle, stronghold of the FitzGerald Earls of Kildare, St Patrick's College, Ireland's historic national seminary with a Pugin-designed chapel, its modern successor Maynooth University, and Carton House, the FitzGeralds' grand estate on the edge of town — 4 stops through a Kildare university town.

A Georgian Gothic mansion built over a medieval abbey and later home to tenor Count John McCormack, a stone aqueduct carrying the Grand Canal over the Barrow, and the church an earl gave the town in 1772.

The second-tallest high cross in Ireland, buried and forgotten until 1835, standing beside the shattered fragments of a second cross carved in the same century.

The sites of six medieval castles and tower houses that once studded the walled county town, seat of the Kings of Leinster before the Anglo-Norman conquest — 6 stops through Naas.

Trace how a Cavalry Barracks conjured a market town out of Liffeyside fields — from a medieval priory quarried for its stone, to the bank, church and priory that grew up around the soldiers who came after.

Walk the Georgian grid of a cotton town built on a five-year gamble — from a Palladian villa and a limestone Gothic church to the squares where the first rebel victory of 1798 was won.

Walk from the Gothic tower of Rathangan Church, past the old courthouse and a canalside warehouse, down to the stone bridge and lock-keeper's cottage where the Grand Canal shaped this small Kildare town.

A canal-side hotel that carried 100,000 passengers a year before the railways killed its trade, and the stretch of Grand Canal that built the entire village around it.

A short loop around a Grand Canal harbour town — from the humpback bridge where barges once queued, past a mill owner's crumbling house and a century-old tin church, to the railway station that put Sallins on the national front page in 1976.

Three churches, a lost RIC barracks and a stone bridge cluster around a Liffeyside village crossroads — with a Norman tower house, tunnel and all, a short walk further on.

From Ireland's premier flat-racing plain to the state-owned stud farm purchased with a single Grand National win, this trail covers the heart of Irish thoroughbred country.