Kilkea Castle

Sir Walter de Riddlesford built a motte and bailey on the site in 1180. A granddaughter of his married Maurice Fitzgerald, 3rd Baron of Offaly, carrying the manor of Kilkea into a family that would hold it for more than seven hundred years. Sir Thomas de Rokeby, Justiciar of Ireland from 1349 to 1356, used the castle as his military base and died there in 1356.

When the O'Mores and O'Dempsies wasted the English Pale in 1414, Grose's Antiquities of Ireland has Thomas Crawley, Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Justice, setting out from Dublin but getting no farther than Castledermot, his troops going forward under their military leaders while he remained "engaged in processions and prayers for their success"; the enemy, by that account, "were defeated with great slaughter at Kilkea". In 1426 John FitzGerald, 6th Earl of Kildare, reputedly "strengthened Kilkea with so many new works, that he might be said almost to have new built it".

The castle is bound up with Gerald, 11th Earl of Kildare, the "Wizard Earl", who at twelve became the eldest male representative of the Geraldines after his half-brother "Silken Thomas", the 10th Earl, and five uncles were executed at Tyburn in 1537. He escaped Ireland and was sent to the continent to be educated; on his return to Kildare and restoration to his titles, his interest in alchemy drew much attention among his neighbours around Kilkea, and he was said to possess magic powers. He died in 1585, and is supposed to return to the castle every seventh year mounted on a silver-shod white charger.

In 1634 Countess Elizabeth, widow of Gerald FitzGerald, 14th Earl of Kildare, leased the castle to the Jesuit Order, which stayed until 1646 and in that last year entertained Archbishop Rinuccini, Papal Nuncio to the Confederation of Kilkenny, at Kilkea. When the 19th Earl of Kildare made Carton House the family seat early in the 18th century, Kilkea passed to a succession of tenants. One was Thomas Reynolds, a Dublin silk merchant and "friend" of Lord Edward FitzGerald, through whom he had become a United Irishman before turning informer; his work for the government did not save the castle, renovated shortly before, from being sacked by the military during the rebellion.

The sale of Carton House in 1949 made Kilkea the seat of the 8th Duke of Leinster, but the Fitzgeralds sold castle and estate in 1960. It was restored and developed as a hotel in 1966 under the architect Niall Montgomery; the hotel entered examinership in 2009 in the Irish financial crisis and was closed and put up for sale the following year. The American businessman Jay Cashman then bought it, spending $35 million on renovations and reopening it as a resort.