St Patrick's Day, 1932
The Kiltegan Fathers
St Patrick's Missionary Society - known the world over as the Kiltegan Fathers - was founded in the village on 17 March 1932 by Monsignor Patrick Whitney. The story starts earlier, with a 1920 appeal to Maynooth students for priests to serve in Nigeria; Kiltegan became the base when a tea merchant, John Hughes, gave an old house and twenty acres of land to the cause. From that hillside the order spread missions across Africa through the middle of the 20th century, and a small Wicklow village lent its name to priests working thousands of miles away. The society moved its headquarters to Nairobi in 2015, but the mother house at High Park, about two kilometres from the village, remains - now with a retirement home for older members and a wind turbine on the ridge above it.
Quoted at £15,000, built for £25,000
Humewood and the lawsuit that broke an architect
Humewood Castle is the kind of building that gets architects talked about for the wrong reasons. The English architect William White designed it for William Hume-Dick, MP for Wicklow, as a granite shooting retreat, and built it between 1867 and 1870 in a riot of High Victorian Gothic - turrets, a round tower, an angular tower, granite walls thick enough to last centuries. The trouble was the bill. White had quoted around fifteen thousand pounds; the finished house cost roughly twenty-five. When Hume-Dick refused to pay the difference, the builder, Albert Kimberley of Banbury, sued - and after a five-year battle won his claim with costs. The case became a landmark in architectural and building-contract law. White's career never recovered and he died without another major commission. The house stayed with the Hume family until 1992, was run for a while as an exclusive private hotel, and was bought by the American media billionaire John Malone in 2012. It is a private estate today, not open to casual visitors, though it has doubled as a film location for the likes of Ella Enchanted and Laws of Attraction.
A 5th-century saint and a 1973 win
St Tegan and the Tidy Towns trophy
The village takes its name from Cill Téagáin, the church of Tegan, after a saint local tradition makes a disciple of St Patrick in the 5th century - the original reason there is a settlement here at all. The honours have been thinner on the ground since, but Kiltegan did take the national Tidy Towns title in 1973, which in a village this size is a story the older locals will still tell you. The GAA club, fielding football, hurling and camogie and drawing players from the neighbouring village of Rathdangan, is the other thread that holds the place together through the year.