Baile na mBreatnach · Co. Kildare
A one-road estate village in the Liffey valley, shaped by the La Touche family of Harristown and tied to John Ruskin's lost love.
Brannockstown is a single line of houses following the road between two junctions in the Liffey valley, six kilometres east of Kilcullen and five west of Ballymore Eustace. The Irish name, Baile na mBreatnach, means "the town of the Welshmen" - the Brannocks or Breatnaigh who held land here on the edge of the old Pale. A map of 1752 already shows it as "Brenockstown", a scatter of small roads and houses with a larger house to the north.
That larger house is the key to the place. Harristown, the seat of the La Touche family - the Huguenot banking dynasty who founded what became the Bank of Ireland - sits in the townland next door. For sixty-two years the estate was run by John La Touche, "the Master", and the village as you find it now is largely his doing. In 1882 he built a Baptist chapel and a fine manse here, having been converted to the Baptist cause; in 1885 he knocked down the remains of Portlester Castle and used the stone to build a National School. Even the Church of Ireland church a kilometre away at Carnalway is a La Touche commission.
Behind the estate-builder is a quieter, sadder story. The Master's daughter, Rose La Touche, was the great unrequited love of John Ruskin, the Victorian critic. He first met her when she was ten and he was nearly forty; he proposed when she was eighteen and waited for an answer that never properly came. Rose died young in 1875 and was buried at the church in Carnalway. Ruskin, who learned of her death on the day of the funeral, never recovered from it. La Touche Cottage in the village - once Rose Cottage - is said to have been built for her.
Do not come expecting services. There is no pub, no shop, no place to eat or stay in the village itself. What there is, is a tight knot of nineteenth-century heritage, a Harry Clarke window worth a small detour, a Georgian house that opens its doors in summer, and the long green view down the Liffey valley toward Wicklow. Treat it as a stop on a longer Kildare drive, not a place in its own right, and it rewards you.