The woman who named a town
Saint Coca
In the 6th century a woman called Coca — or Cocca — set up a Christian settlement beside the Rye Water at what is now Kilcock. She was, according to tradition, a sister of Saint Kevin of Glendalough and an embroiderer of vestments for Saint Colmcille. Her feast day is June 6th. Most Irish place names beginning with 'Cill' (church) are followed by a male saint's name. Kilcock is not. The circular street system around Saint Coca's graveyard still follows the outer enclosure boundary of her original 6th-century settlement. Modern urban planning arranged itself around a woman's decision made 1,400 years ago.
Built bankrupt, still standing
The Royal Canal
The Royal Canal reached Kilcock in 1796. By then the company behind it had already gone bankrupt once — construction costs hit £118,000 and the canal was not finished. It kept going anyway, eventually connecting Dublin to the Shannon. Commercial traffic died off in the 19th century when the railway arrived. The canal fell into disrepair through most of the 20th. Kilcock Harbour was restored in 1982, reopened to boats in 2010, and the Kilcock Canoe Polo Club — which has hosted national and European championships — has been based here since. The towpath is now part of the 130-kilometre Royal Canal Greenway. The canal outlasted the railway, the company that built it, and every canal boat family that worked it.
The emigrant's poet from Kilbrook
Teresa Brayton
Teresa Brayton was born in 1868 in Kilbrook, a townland just outside Kilcock, and emigrated to the United States as a young woman. She spent thirty years writing poetry about Irish emigrant longing, the most famous being 'The Old Bog Road' — a poem about dying far from home that became one of the most recorded Irish songs of the 20th century, covered by Daniel O'Donnell among many others. She came back to Ireland in 1932 and died in 1943 in the same room in Kilbrook where she was born. Kilcock library holds mementos of her. Most people who can sing 'The Old Bog Road' have never heard of the town it came from.
The only one of its kind left in Europe
Larchill
Four kilometres from Kilcock, in the townland of Phepotstown, sits Larchill — an 18th-century ferme ornée, or ornamental farm, built by Quaker merchants called the Prentice family between 1740 and 1780. A ferme ornée is a working farm designed as landscape art: fields, follies, beech avenues, a lake, a gothicised farmyard, classical garden buildings. Larchill's claim is that it is the only surviving near-complete example of its type in Europe. The rest were remodelled, built over, or left to decay. Larchill nearly went the same way in the 1970s and 1980s but was restored in the 1990s. You can walk it now. The Gibraltar folly sits in the middle of the lake. It is not what you expect to find in north Kildare.