Claonadh · Co. Kildare
Two miles from a Jesuit school. Three from a rebel's grave.
Clane is a north Kildare town of eight thousand people that carries more history per acre than most places three times its size. In a two-kilometre radius you have a medieval Franciscan friary, the site of the opening shots of the 1798 Rebellion, and the Jesuit boarding school where James Joyce spent his first unhappy years away from home. That is not a small hand to be dealt.
The Joyce connection is the one that travels furthest. Clongowes Wood College - three kilometres north on the R408 - is where Joyce arrived as a six-year-old in September 1888 and left, abruptly, three years later when his father's finances collapsed. The first forty pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are set there: the cold showers, the infirmary, the corridor, the pandying of the hands. Every Jesuit school in Ireland claims Joyce. This one actually had him. The campus is private; you cannot walk in on a whim. But you can drive out and stand at the gate and understand why a child's memory of the place lasted a lifetime.
Bodenstown is the other anchor. Theobald Wolfe Tone - barrister, revolutionary, founding theorist of Irish republicanism - is buried in a graveyard six kilometres south of town, in the flat Kildare countryside near Sallins. He died in 1798, the same year United Irishmen rebels clashed with yeomen forces on Coiseanna Hill here in Clane, in one of the first engagements of that rebellion. Since 1873, people have been marching to Bodenstown to lay wreaths and make speeches. Since 1922, there have been rival marches - the republican movement having split, and then split again. Every June Sunday, Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin, the various socialist republican groupings, each march on a different day, each claiming Tone as theirs. As political spectacle it is unmatched in Ireland.
What you get in between the history is a working commuter town with a hotel that means business, a GAA club that won the county championship in 1997, a river walk that rewards an early morning, and a population that has roughly doubled since the millennium without losing its sense of itself. Clane is not somewhere you come for a weekend of relaxation. You come because the connections - literary, revolutionary, ecclesiastical - are genuinely worth the detour from the motorway.
