How the village got its English name
The leap
The tradition is consistent across the old topographical accounts: a member of the de Lacy family, fleeing a Mac Geoghegan raid, reached his castle here to find the drawbridge already up. Rather than turn and fight, he set his horse at the moat and cleared it. The English name — Horseleap — fixed itself to the place and never let go. Some sources name Hugh de Lacy himself; others just say a de Lacy. The Irish name, Baile Átha an Urchair, is older and unrelated and means the town of the ford of the cast.
1192, on the frontier of Meath
The motte
Hugh de Lacy held the lordship of Meath after the Norman invasion and his family threw up a chain of mottes along its western edge to hold the line against the Irish lordships beyond. The Horseleap motte is one of them — dated 1192, raised by his son Walter, since Hugh had been killed at Durrow in 1186 by one of his own Irish workmen. The motte is partly slumped now, but still the size and shape it was meant to be: a flat-topped mound with a bailey beside it, built fast in earth and timber while the masons were busy elsewhere. The motte outlasted the family that built it by eight centuries and counting.