The cold that lasted a lifetime
Joyce at Clongowes
James Joyce arrived at Clongowes Wood College on 1 September 1888, six years old, and stayed until 1891 when his father John Stanislaus Joyce — charming, improvident, permanently in debt — could no longer afford the fees. The boy's memory of the place was precise and unforgiving: the cold showers before dawn, the smell of the urinals, the unfair pandying of the hands by Father Dolan, the boy Wells shouldering Stephen into the square ditch. All of it went into the opening of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Joyce began in 1907 and published in 1916. The real Father Dolan — Father Daly — was confronted by the real Rector after the real incident, and the real Rector laughed it off. In the novel, the boy Stephen takes his complaint to the Rector and is vindicated. The wish fulfillment of a six-year-old, preserved in amber for a century.
The grave they all want to own
Wolfe Tone and Bodenstown
Theobald Wolfe Tone was a Dublin barrister who concluded, in the early 1790s, that the only way to resolve Ireland's political situation was to separate from Britain entirely, with French assistance if necessary. He organised the United Irishmen, negotiated with the French Directorate, and led an invasion force to Bantry Bay in 1796 that was dispersed by storms. He tried again in 1798, was captured off Donegal, and died in a Dublin prison — by his own hand, or so the official account runs — in November of that year. He was buried at Bodenstown, six kilometres south of Clane. The first commemoration at his grave was held in 1873. They have continued, with occasional gaps, ever since. Since 1922, when the republican movement split over the Treaty, there have been rival marches on rival Sundays, each faction claiming Tone as the true ancestor. The Sunday nearest his birthday — 20 June — is the busiest. Politicians deliver speeches, bands play, wreaths are laid. It is a fixture of the Irish political calendar unlike any other.
The rebellion begins here
The Battle of Clane, 1798
The 1798 Rebellion in Kildare opened on Coiseanna Hill, near what is now the Woods Centre in Clane, on 24 May 1798. United Irishmen rebels, badly armed and imperfectly organised, engaged Richard Griffith's yeomanry force and were routed. The survivors fled toward Timahoe to join other north Kildare insurgents. It was the first engagement of what became, in Wexford especially, a serious military campaign. In Kildare, the rebellion was suppressed within weeks. The coordinates of that first skirmish — a low hill on the edge of a modern shopping development — are easy to miss. The event is harder to forget if you know it happened.
"Hortus Angelorum" — the garden of angels
The Franciscans at Clane
Gerald FitzMaurice FitzGerald founded the Franciscan Friary at Clane in 1258 — one of the earliest mendicant foundations in Ireland. The friars called it Hortus Angelorum, the garden of angels. It hosted a major Franciscan chapter in 1345. Gerald FitzMaurice himself was buried within its walls in 1259. Henry VIII dissolved it in 1542 and distributed the property — church, cemetery, chapter-house, dormitory, kitchen, orchard and all — to three Englishmen for £177. A small community of friars returned in 1647 and was finally dispersed by 1650. The Abbey Cemetery, where the friary stood, is still there. The remains are modest — fragments of medieval stonework integrated into a community centre — but the site has been continuously sacred for seven hundred years, which is not nothing.