St. Brigid's Cathedral and Round Tower

Brigid's Kildare

Long-standing tradition holds that Brigid founded her monastery here in the late fifth century at Cill Dara, the church of the oak, and that it became one of the great monastic centres of early Ireland, governing a community of women and men. The present cathedral, first built in the thirteenth century and restored in the nineteenth, stands on that site. Beside it rises the round tower, and in the churchyard are the low remains of the fire temple where Brigid's sisters are said to have tended a perpetual flame until the Reformation.

The cathedral is a restrained medieval building, its thirteenth-century form recovered in a careful nineteenth-century restoration. The round tower beside it, twelfth-century and around thirty-three metres tall, keeps its raised granite doorway; in season visitors can climb it for a view over the Curragh plain. The Fire House, the roofless stone footprint near the cathedral, marks the fire tradition that gave Kildare part of its fame.