A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
Cill Dara· Irish · main form · validated name
Kildare· English · main form
Place & story
The church and the settlement
Lewis’s 1837 history makes the religious foundation associated with Brigid central to the growth of Kildare. He describes houses gathering around the monastery and the later importance of an episcopal see. The account connects the name with oaks and a religious site, although it offers variant forms and interpretations. This guide retains that association as Lewis’s historical explanation without treating his whole early chronology as independently established.[2]
Repeated rebuilding
The directory’s narrative contains repeated fires, attacks and changes to religious establishments. It also describes the later creation of a defensive castle and additional religious houses.[2]
Folklore & tradition
The fire in a medieval account
Gerald of Wales's late-twelfth-century Topographia Hibernica records a fire at Kildare tended by women in Brigid's religious community. Alongside that practice he reports miraculous claims, including that the ashes did not increase despite the fuel consumed. His account is evidence that these stories circulated in the medieval period; it does not prove their supernatural elements. A modern Kildare Libraries discussion likewise identifies the fire as a tradition associated with the town.[3][4]
Folklore & tradition
Brigid's bird and the local landscape
The same medieval work tells of a falcon popularly called Brigid's bird, said to perch on the church tower and respond to the townspeople and castle's knights. This belongs to Gerald's collection of wonders. Its details connect the saint's reputation with a recognisable local setting of church, castle, waterways and birds. Treating it as a recorded legend allows the story to retain its interest without turning a devotional marvel into a zoological or biographical fact. Brigid's Kildare identity has been sustained through such narratives as well as through institutions and buildings.[3]
Both counts use the 2016 settlement boundary, allowing like-for-like comparison. CSO supplies the 2022 count on this older boundary for comparison only. The official 2022 Built Up Area has different boundaries.
View population figures
Kildare — Census 2016 settlement footprint — census population
These figures use different area definitions. Read the boundary note before comparing them.
Kildare, Kildare
Published census settlement populations
8,634people · 2016
Settlement boundaries changed during this period. Differences may reflect boundary changes as well as population change. Where a 2011 legal-town-and-environs count is shown, it has not been recalculated onto the 2016 settlement boundary.
placenames