Staplestown, Baile an Stáibléaraigh, Co. Kildare

A north Kildare farming village with a church the British burned in 1798, four kilometres from the woods at Donadea.

Staplestown is a small farming village in north Kildare, roughly forty kilometres west of Dublin in the flat country between Clane, Prosperous and the woods at Donadea. There is a church, a primary school, a GAA pitch and a shop. That is most of it. It is the kind of place you pass through on a country road rather than set out for, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The name is the interesting part. Baile an Stáibléaraigh has been read as "the town of the stapler" - a staple being a medieval market town with the official right to trade in particular goods. Whatever commerce that designation once carried has long gone. What is left is an ordinary Irish rural parish that happens to have one genuinely old building at its centre and one sharp moment of history attached to it.

That moment is 1798. On 24 May rebels stormed the British barracks at Prosperous, eight kilometres west, and killed most of the garrison. The next day the troops came through and burned the thatched chapel at Staplestown in reprisal. The parish rebuilt it. The church that stands now, St Benignus, was raised on the old walls and enlarged in 1829, and it is reckoned one of the oldest Catholic churches in the Kildare and Leighlin diocese.

Come for the church and the woods, not for a day out in the village itself. Donadea Forest Park is four kilometres up the road and is the one thing in this corner of Kildare that genuinely draws people. Staplestown is the parish around it - school, pitch, a graveyard worth a slow walk - rather than a destination in its own right.