Cill Dangain · Co. Kildare
A small south Kildare village that breeds Epsom Derby winners.
Kildangan sits on the R417 between Monasterevin and Athy - a crossroads village of 317 people surrounded by flat Kildare farmland and the flood plain of the River Barrow. You could drive through it in under a minute. You would miss the point entirely.
The point is Kildangan Stud. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum bought the property in 1986 from the More O'Ferrall family, who had worked it since the late 18th century - first as estate, then as training yard, then as stud from 1946. Sheikh Mohammed expanded what he found into a 1,500-acre operation. Over 400 horses. Around 250 employees. The main house stands on the site of a Norman castle that was dynamited in 1882, its stone reused for the Victorian building that replaced it. The stud's foaling unit - Whitefield Yard - has produced Epsom Derby winners Shaamit and High-Rise, and Group 1 champions including Cape Cross and Singspiel. It is one node in the Darley network that spans England, Kentucky and Australia.
The village itself is modest. One pub, a Gala forecourt that doubles as a convenience store since the post office closed in 2004, a GAA club with a complicated history of foundings and re-foundings. The Local Link bus runs three times daily to Athy and Kildare town. The railway station closed in 1963. What the village has - and what draws people who know horses - is context. The studs of south Kildare sit in a horse-country corridor that has no real equivalent in Europe. The limestone grass, the mild winters, the proximity to the Curragh. Kildangan Stud did not end up here by accident.
