A church site since at least 1291
Cill Bhríde, the church of Brigid
The Irish name ties the place to Brigid of Kildare, the great female saint, and the graveyard is thought to sit on the site of an Anglo-Norman parish church founded before 1250. The earliest written record is from 1291, as Kylbryde in the Colach, when the whole district was forested and formed part of the estates of the Archbishop of Dublin; the lordship of Kilbride was held by the Knights Hospitaller of Kilteel until their dissolution. The Catholic chapel in the village was built in 1776, enlarged in 1835, and replaced by the present church in 1881. For a place this small, the church has been the constant for the best part of eight hundred years.
George Ogle Moore, 1824
The Moore manor
The Manor in the name is barely two centuries old. In 1824 George Ogle Moore, a Dublin barrister who sat as MP for the city, bought the Kilbride estate and had a Tudor Revival house built to a design by the architect Thomas Cobden - it was still under construction when the valuation surveyors came through in 1843. The Moore family held the manor and lordship into the 1950s, and their estate once stretched east through the hills to Kippure. The house survives in private hands. The grander local seats are gone or changed: Tinode House, built nearby in 1864 by the Kildare MP William Cogan, and Kippure House, where the English butterfly collector John Henry Leech was living in 1891.
A passage grave, around 3,300 BC
Seefin and the tomb on the mountain
On the summit of Seefin, the mountain south of the village, sits one of the finest passage tombs in the Wicklow uplands. The cairn is about 75 feet across and 18 feet high, with a passage some 30 feet long leading to a cruciform chamber of five compartments, a partly surviving corbelled roof, and decoration carved on a few of the stones. It was built around 3,300 BC, older than Newgrange and older than the Egyptian pyramids. When it was dug in 1931 no human remains were found inside. Seefingan and Seahan, the next summits along, carry cairns of their own. The walk up starts near Kilbride Military Camp - note that the firing range there flies red flags on active days, and you keep clear when it does.
From a Kippure spring to the open valley
The first stretch of the Liffey
The River Liffey begins as a spring in the blanket bog on Kippure, the mountain that closes off the eastern end of the valley, around 1,800 feet up. It runs down through the hills and reaches Manor Kilbride as its first proper settlement, the place where the river finally leaves the uplands and spreads out before it fills Poulaphouca Reservoir to the south and, eventually, runs on to Dublin. Standing on the bridge in the village, the water going under your feet is the same river that runs past the Four Courts. It is a long way, in distance and in character, from here to there.