A cast-iron thanks from the tenantry, 1899
The Tickell fountain
The fountain at the centre of the village was erected in 1899 by the County Kildare tenantry of Captain Thomas Tickell of Cheltenham, who died the year before aged 81. It was designed for drinking at three levels — lion-head spouts for people, a circular trough for horses, quarter-circle dishes at ground level for hounds. Cast by Tonge and Taggart of Dublin to designs by John Joseph O'Callaghan. It no longer runs. Memorials raised by tenants in memory of a landlord were unusual in 19th-century Ireland; that this one exists, and is this elaborate, says something about the man, even if the record doesn't say much else.
Ireland's national hunt festival, in a field outside the village
Punchestown
Punchestown Racecourse is 5 km south of Naas and inside the parish of Eadestown. The national hunt festival runs across four days in late April and is the largest horse-racing event in Ireland by attendance. For four days the roads around the village change character entirely. The rest of the year Punchestown holds a quieter schedule of meets. The racecourse is historically tied to the wider Kildare racing landscape — the Curragh is twenty minutes north — but Punchestown is specifically a jumps track, and the April festival is the reason people come.
How an underage GAA side produced two Test players
The rugby club that never was
Tadhg Beirne was born in Eadestown in 1992. He played Gaelic football for Eadestown GAA to under-16 level, then switched codes at Naas RFC at the age of 11 and never looked back. His mother was the 1983 Rose of Tralee. He became one of the best forwards in European rugby, earned a Grand Slam medal with Ireland, and played Lions rugby. Jimmy O'Brien — another Ireland international — came through the same underage football sides. The club didn't produce them as rugby players; it produced them as athletes with the ball in their hands. The rest followed.
The man who won All-Irelands for Cork and grew up in Kildare
Larry Tompkins
Larry Tompkins was born in Greenmount, just outside Naas, and played his early club football with Eadestown, winning junior and intermediate county titles with them in the early 1980s. A transfer dispute that hinged on the county board refusing to pay his flight tickets from New York ended his Kildare senior career before it had properly started. He transferred to Cork, won All-Ireland senior medals in 1989 and 1990 — captaining the 1990 team — and later managed the county from 1996 to 2003. Inducted into the Munster GAA Football Hall of Fame in 2024. Eadestown's name is on his early career; Cork's name is on everything after.