Royal site The earliest evidence of human habitation at Ardclough was the discovery of a flint dated to 4800–3600BC, at
Castlewarden below
Oughter Ard Hill, rare for a dry-land location from the time.
Lyons Hill was the inauguration site and base for 10 Uí Dúnchada
kings of Leinster. The
Battle of Glen Mama, where
Brian Boru defeated
Máel Mórda king of Leinster and
Sitric Silkbeard King of Dublin in
999, is believed to have taken place on the Dublin side of Oughterard Hill. The area was accorded its own place-legend in the
Dindsenchas,
Liamuin.
Lyons subsequently became home to the Aylmer, Tyrrell and Lawless families.
Historic buildings There are five medieval churches and three castles in the area. Most important is
Oughter Ard, a seventh-century monastery associated with saints
Briga (feast day 21 January) and
Derchairthinn (feast day 8 March) and site of a round tower. Recent research has estimated that the ruined church there dates to 1350, not 1609 as previously believed. It was the site of a Royal Manor.
Whitechurch, (Ecclesia Alba, named for the Carmelite order) was granted in 1320, and enfifed in 1508. A single headstone is the only reminder of the church of
Castledillon, (1000), once a parish of its own. The graveyard beside another disappeared church at
Clonaghlis, (pre 1206) is still in use and is associated with female saints Fedhlim and Mughain.
Castlewarden (c1200) church has disappeared.
Reeves Castle, on the Celbridge road, was built in the 14th century. A mass house built below
Oughter Ard hill in 1714 became the site of the first modern Catholic church in 1810 and a school in 1839.
Lyons parish was united with Oughterard in 1541 and with
Kill in 1693. The centre of the parish moved to Kill in 1823. The former Lyons parish church (built 1810, refurbished 1896) was deconsecrated in 1985 and is now a private house. It was replaced by a new church in Tipperstown, designed by Paul O'Daly. A marble font, brought from Rome by Valentine Lawless and presented to the church, was removed to Lyons House for safekeeping but remains the property of the parish. A well-preserved moated site at Puddlehall dates to the 13th century and was cited by
University College Dublin Professor Sean O Riordain as one of the finest examples of a moated house in Ireland.
Lyons,
Reeves and
Oughter Ard tower houses date to the 14th century. The large houses of
Bishopscourt (constructed 1790) and Lyons (constructed 1804-10) provided an economic focus of the community in the 19th century, as did the
Grand Canal (reached Ardclough 1763) in the vicinity of the 13th lock.
Grand canal When work on the
Grand Canal began in 1756 Ardclough's was one of the first sections to be dug. The canal reached Ardclough in 1763, when the 13th lock, a double lock built with
Pozzuolona mortar, was opened, following the ambitious design of the canal's original engineer,
Thomas Omer. After Omer's plans proved too expensive a new engineer, John Trail, took over construction of the canal in 1768, the proposed canal capacity was reduced from 170 ton barges to 40 ton barges. Canal records show that " Lyons or Clonaughles lock" was reduced in size in 1783, but the canal through the thirteenth lock serves as a reminder of Omer's original plan, wide, compared with the width adopted by Trail. Ardclough Bridge was named in original plans for the Bruton family of Clonaghlis but constructed with a name plate bearing the name of the Henry family of
Straffan. From 1777 a local river, the
Morrel was proposed as water feeder for the canal, construction resumed and the first passenger boats were towed to
Sallins in February 1779. Local landowner
The 2nd Baron Cloncurry was a canal enthusiast, constructing the
Lyons mill and lockyard village complex in the 1820s and serving as chairman of the
Grand Canal Company five times during his lifetime. The canal was an important, if slow, passenger thoroughfare feeding passenger's to John Barry's hotel at Lyons. When in 1834 Flyboats increased the average speed for passenger boats from to Ireland's first railway was already under construction. a possible reference to nearby Clonaghlis graveyard.
Notable events The
Great Southern & Western Railway (constructed 1844) and
Straffan railway station (used until 1947) opened communications to Dublin for cattle and horse dealers. A
railway accident on 5 October 1853, the third-worst in Irish rail history, killed 18 people including four children in the townland of Clownings. It occurred in heavy fog when a goods train ran into the back of a stalled passenger train at a point 974 yards south of the former
Straffan Station. The goods train smashed the first-class carriage, which was driven a quarter of a mile through station. The tragedy was the subject of a poem by Donegal-born poet
William Allingham. It was the
third worst accident in rail history to that date. In the
Ardclough Sedition Case in October 1917,
Nora J Murray, a nationalist poet and writer, the headmistress of Ardclough
National School was accused by local Irish Unionist Bertram Hugh Barton of 'sedition in time of war' under the
Defence of the Realm Act. He complained about her teaching of Irish history, illegal at the time. in a complaint made in the name of one of Barton's tenants, Kathleen Bourke, an activist in the Women's Unionist Association. After a local defence fund was mounted by the INTO and the local community, the charged was not pursued by the Dublin Castle regime but Murray she was forced out of the area and the house where she lodged was later burned by the British Army. The Barnewell homestead at Lyons was the headquarters of anti-treaty forces in north Kildare during the
Irish Civil War. On 22 June 1975
Whitechurch resident Christy Phelan was killed when he engaged a group of men planting a bomb on the railway line near Baronrath. The bomb was designed to derail the train headed for the Republican Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown. His selfless intervention prevented greater loss of life. This is one of a number of British undercover operations carried out against civilian targets in the Republic during the Troubles, currently under investigation by the
Barron Commission. The biggest train robbery to date in the history of Ireland took place at Kearneystown on 31 March 1976 when £150,000 was taken from the Dublin-Cork mail train.
Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847)
fought a duel with
John d’Esterre at
Oughterard on 1 February 1815.
Economy Limestone quarries (sinkhole recorded 1804) made Ardclough townland, which is located on a canal bank, the focus of economic activity from the 1800s until the death of owner Patrick Sullivan in 1879 (peak activity 1850s). This townland was also chosen as the location for Lyons parish church (1811) and St Anne's National School (1834). Boston Lime Company reduced the price to six shillings per load in 1875 but a footnote in the 1891 census returns attributes the decline in population from 75 to 21 in Ardclough townland to the closure of quarries. Stone was brought by light railway to the nearby quays and by canal barge to Sullivan's lime kiln. Ardclough limestone was used in the construction of Naas jail and hospital. The census reports of the mid-19th century indicate how the small townland of Ardclough came to give its name to the adjoining district, but by 1901 there were only six people living there. A cluster of warehouses and workshops at
Lyons lockyard village was largely constructed in the 1820s, featuring a mill (leased to William Palmer 1839 and Joseph Shackleton, second cousin of Antarctic explorer
Ernest Shackleton, 1853, converted to roller mill 1887), hotel (leased by Patrick Barry 1840-60), police station (active 1820-73 ) and boatyard. This complex employed over 100 people at their peak but declined when the focus shifted away from the canal, the decline in fortunes of the Lawless family and most dramatically as a consequence of the accidental burning of the mill in 1903. In September 2006 the buildings were restored as themed residences and a restaurant.
Ardclough Relocates When the GAA club (1936), community hall (1940, reconstructed 2004) and school (1950) were built on a crossroads beneath Henry Bridge, and it shifted the focus of the community to a site in Tipperstown, which is regarded as the modern Ardclough. The population was boosted by houses built at Wheatfield (1940), Boston Hill (1949–51) and Tipperstown (Wheatfield Estate 1976, Lishandra Estate 1989).
St. Anne's Church, a Catholic church designed by Paul O’Daly was sited nearby in 1985. ==Sport==