An Irishman’s Diary about searching for Kildare’s strangest tourist attraction

The classic Irish advice to a tourist seeking directions – “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” – is more often cited as a joke than as wisdom. Even so, I gained a new appreciation of its profundity in Kildare recently when trying to find one of Ireland’s most famous architectural follies, the “Wonderful Barn”.

I was somewhere between Celbridge and Leixlip at the time, as is the building in question. And I had both my teenage daughter and my iPhone’s GPS looking out for any signs of the strange structure. But neither was able to enlighten me.

So remembering that the barn was built (in 1743) as part of the Castletown Estate in Celbridge – it was supposed to provide a “terminating vista” from the east windows of the great house – I decided we should first look for that instead. We could hardly go wrong from there.

Alas, we could. After parking in Castletown – now in State-ownership – we found the east wing of the house with no difficulty. But the only terminating vista we could see was trees. And among the various signs around the estate, there was no mention of the barn.

So then we asked a man walking his dog. And upon confirming we had a car, he proceeded to give directions that would have involved us going back the way we came, and from there taking so many twists and turns that you’d need to have been a chess grandmaster to memorise them. I didn’t even attempt that. Instead I stopped him and, masking exasperation, said I thought the barn was supposed to be visible from the house.

“Well, it’s straight down there,” he replied, pointing at the trees: “You can see it in the winter all right.” But he seemed very doubtful about out chances of reaching it on foot: “It’s a fair hike. It could be a bit overgrown too.”

Far from discouraging us, however, this still sounded like a much better plan than driving. It was a fine, late-summer’s evening, after all, and my daughter and I were not averse to hiking.

So off we went, in the direction towards which the very wealthy Conolly family once enjoyed a distant view of their architectural marvel, erected as a local employment scheme after the famine of 1740/41.

And I’d have settled for a distant view of it myself by now. But that wasn’t to be, at least from here. After a trudge through increasingly dense vegetation, the most terminating vista we found was a high fence, with even denser vegetation beyond it.

When we followed the fence around, hoping for a gate somewhere, we instead found ourselves doubling back into the open space of the OPW-maintained Castletown grounds. The yellow fields were pleasantly strewn with bales, so we could see the harvest, all right. But there was still no sign of the barn.

As I later realised, our attempts to find it by travelling as the crow flies were doomed, because the days when Castletown’s east wing and the site of its terminating vista – circa 1743 – were contiguous have long since passed.

Among the obstructions an actual crow would now fly over en route between the two are the campus of Hewlett Packard’s Irish HQ and the M4 motorway, both vistas that William “the Speaker” Conolly and his descendants could hardly have imagined.

In the end, we had no choice but to follow the complex road directions, which were only complex because we were starting from the wrong place. Notwithstanding its historical connections with Castletown, which is in Celbridge, the barn is much easier to find these days from Leixlip, as we did eventually.

And it’s certainly worth seeing. It looks more like a minaret or a ziggurat than anything resembling a barn, although its internal structure suggests that, social employment and vista provision apart, it was indeed once used to store grain.

Not that you can visit the inside now. Unless and until conservationists find a new life for the building, the most you can do is gaze at it from a safe distance.

Anyway, I was reminded of our barn-seeking expedition by an email about a talk that’s happening next Monday night in another Kildare town, Maynooth. It’s hosted by Maynooth University’s Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and takes place in one of those houses, Carton.

But the subject is the aforementioned Castletown Estate, and in particular the early years when it rose to its greatest and most manicured extent. The speaker is Jeanne Meldon of the Castletown Foundation. More details (and directions) are at historicirishhouses.ie