Gerald, 11th Earl of Kildare
The Wizard Earl
Gerald FitzGerald was twelve years old in 1537 when his half-brother Silken Thomas and five of his uncles were hanged at Tyburn for rebelling against Henry VIII. Gerald was the last male of the Kildare Geraldines. He spent years in hiding on the continent, got his estates and title restored under Mary I in 1552, and came home to Kilkea. He devoted himself to medicine, astronomy, and metallurgy — the natural sciences of his century. Kilkea's neighbours had a shorter name for it: alchemy. He was said to practise magic in the castle. He died there in 1585. The legend that grew afterwards says he and his phantom knights sleep beneath Mullaghmast Rath, riding out every seventh year on silver-shod horses. When the shoes wear thin enough, he rides out for good and frees Ireland from English rule. A blacksmith reported seeing the troop on the Curragh around 1895. The shoes, evidently, are not worn through yet.
Born here, 15 February 1874
Shackleton
Kilkea House, in the village — not the castle, a different building — was where Ernest Shackleton entered the world. His father Henry was farming there when Ernest was born, the second of ten children. The family left Kilkea when Ernest was six, moving to Dublin and then to London. He was ten when he left Ireland for the last time. What came after: three British Antarctic expeditions, the Nimrod voyage that got within 97 miles of the South Pole in 1909, and then the Endurance expedition of 1914–17, when the ship was crushed in pack ice, the crew survived on drifting floes for months, and Shackleton navigated an open boat 1,300 kilometres to South Georgia to organise rescue. Every man survived. He died on South Georgia in January 1922, age 47, before the last expedition was finished. The Shackleton Museum is in Athy, four miles north, and has the Endurance model and the autumn school. Kilkea has the house he was born in. Neither is the whole story.
1273–1960
The FitzGerald Seven Centuries
Kilkea Castle came to the FitzGeralds in 1273 through the marriage of Emmeline de Riddlesford to Maurice FitzGerald, 3rd Lord of Offaly. They kept it for 687 years. Through the Tudor reconquest, the Cromwellian wars, Catholic emancipation, and land reform, the FitzGeralds of Kildare held Kilkea. John FitzGerald, 6th Earl, essentially rebuilt it in 1426. The restoration after the Silken Thomas catastrophe. The Dukes of Leinster in the 18th century. The sale in 1960, when the line could no longer maintain it. A run that length — seven centuries in one castle — is unusual enough anywhere in Europe. In Ireland, it is almost unique.
The Norman founding, c. 1180
Walter de Riddlesford's Castle
Walter de Riddlesford came to Ireland with the Normans in the aftermath of Strongbow's 1169 invasion. He was given the barony of Bray and, separately, the lands around Kilkea. Around 1180 he built a motte and bailey — earth and timber, the rapid-deployment option of 12th-century military engineering — and then a stone castle on the site. It was one of the earliest stone fortifications in Leinster. De Riddlesford is a minor figure in the Norman colonisation narrative; Kilkea Castle is his main surviving fact. The descendants of his Norman contemporaries would go on to become the Earls of Kildare and, eventually, as the old phrase has it, 'more Irish than the Irish themselves.'