Anglo Normans

The tenth Earl of Kildare, Silken Thomas, believed a rumour that his father had died in the tower, the false rumour led to the 20-year-old's rejection of the Sword of State and declaration of war. After an ill-advised campaign he surrendered and after a cruel detention at the Tower of London was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1537 and an Act of Parliament decreed all the lands confiscated. Other members of the family were executed, leaving a lone 12-year-old, Gerald FitzGerald, to be spirited out of the country until his title was "legitimised" by Queen Elizabeth I and a portion of his lands restored in 1554. Sir Nicholas Whyte's family became the occupants of Leixlip Castle in 1569 until Georgian times.

A notable assault on the castle was conducted in the War of The Forties - the 1640's - when Owen Roe O'Neill destroyed the bridge over the Liffey linking Cooldrinagh with Leixlip Castle in 1648. It was O'Neill's brilliance as a commander and strategist which foreshadowed one of Ireland's greatest catastrophes, the emergence of Oliver Cromwell who in eight months created a reputation for cruelty which still stands. The relative calm following Cromwell's departure paved the way for emergence of the Enlightenment, the growth of English wealth, and power which saw Dublin become the second city of the British empire. In 1731 the Irish Parliament published an Act to build a road and construct a bridge over the Liffey. Leixlip Bridge and Toll House were erected in 1734. Travellers were required to pay a toll of a halfpenny. Georgian Society travelled, in season, from throughout the British Isles to view the sight of salmon climbing the cataract. In 1780 visitor Philip Luckcombe recorded the, "It is really a most diverting kind of entertainment to see the many unsuccessful efforts of these large and beautiful fish to gain the tip of the fall before they succeed. Their spring is undoubtedly from the surface. The manner of giving themselves this surprising leap is by bending their tails almost to their heads and by the strong reaction of their tails against the water it is that they spring so much above it."

In 1732 the castle was acquired by William Conolly, nephew of Speaker William Conolly, who inherited Castletown House, the lands of which adjoin the Leixlip demesne to the west. That same year, Dr. Arthur Price, Archbishop of Cashel, bequeathed £100 to his agent, Richard Guinness, and a similar amount to young Arthur Guinness. He invested the money by experimenting with a small brewery on the banks of the Liffey. By 1758 at the age of 34, Guinness required a larger location and decamped to an acre of land at St. James's Gate, Dublin to further his fortunes. The recipe is still made with Kildare water and has evolved into 19 separate recipes to cater for world-wide tastes.

Conolly's legacy included the Palladian architecture of the finest house in Ireland, Castletown. His home was the first Irish house designed by an architect using classical proportions. That architect was Alessandro Galilei. His design served as the model for the White House in the colonies, later to become the United States of America. The Conolly fortune also provided Leixlip with another landmark, the Wonderful Barn. Commissioned by Conolly's widow, Katherine, the conical tower stands 73 feet high and is surmounted by an external spiral stone staircase of 94 steps. It was built in 1743 as a philanthropic gesture to give employment to the poor. The practical purpose was to safeguard the harvest from the marauding O'Tooles and O'Byrnes who scoured the countryside in search of food during the poor Winters of 1739 - 44. A second Conolly project which did not evolve was the creation of a classical thermal spa on land that is now the nature reserve. There the waters bubble from the ground at a constant 75 degrees and drain down to the Rye. The spa was widely used. Louisa Bridge above the spa, was built in 1794, is named after Conolly's wife, Louisa. The Mid-1700's saw the rise of the mill, an iron works, a distillery and linen mill, all industries of the prosperous ascendancy. Cooldrinagh House, Carton House, the Shingled House, and others give testimony to their wealth and power and English connections. The Rye River was disguised to resemble the Thames of London in a landscape attributed to Capability Brown at Carton.

Construction of the Royal Canal began in 1755 after a bitter former director of the Grand Canal competed for a more expensive northerly route to the West from Dublin to the River Shannon. John Binns persuaded the second Duke of Leinster, a trustee of the canal company, to divert the canal southward around his estate at Carton and over the Rye Water, necessitating the construction of an aqueduct 85 feet above the river, 25 feet higher than the famous Clyde navigation in Scotland. The tremendous engineering effort took six years and cost more than £150 million by present standards. The 16 miles of canal works from Dublin to Kilcock took 20 years, time enough for the evolution of the steam engine and doom for canal transport. The canal was sold to the Midland Great Western Railway in 1845 as a quick, ready made route to Mullingar. That same year the director of the Botanic Garden in Dublin noted that the leaves on potato plants in the trial garden had shrivelled and turned black. With a brief account of what he had found in the Dublin Evening Post of 6 September 1845 the Great Famine intervened, destroying the diet for half the population and tearing them from the weeping countryside. As part of the Pale, Leixlip did not suffer to the same extent as the towns and villages to the west with their fields divided and sub-divided.

The Beginning | The Vikings | The Normans | The Anglo-Normans | Future