The planting of the Intel roundabout is one of our proposed projects for the coming year. 

Intel Roundabout Project

You can see from the photographs below that there is some large bare patches on this roundabout. We propose to plant these bare areas. 

Facing East  (Leixlip Village)

Facing South (Matt Goff Bridge)

Facing West (Towards Maynooth)

Facing North (towards Intel complex)

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The area surrounding a pair of huge and noisy waterfalls on the Liffey, called the Salmon Leap, was populated over 5,500 years ago .......

A Brief History of Leixlip

The area surrounding a pair of huge and noisy waterfalls on the Liffey, called the Salmon Leap, was populated over 5,500 years ago, according to tombs and other recent finds at Cooldrinagh Water Works.

The Cist at Cooldrinagh

Cooking places were also found at Barnhall & Parsonstown (where Hewlett Packard has its premises) some years ago. These early settlers kept to the rivers and the lands nearby because travel by water was easiest in a land covered in forests. Since they had only stone tools, cutting their way inland proved difficult. The first written history was begun by a monk, St Columba, and his followers at Iona, Scotland.

St Columba's Church, Confey

Sometime later they established a settlement near the Church of St Columba (~1000AD), the ruins of which are at the rear of Confey cemetery, to the north of Leixlip. After the Norsemen or Vikings arrived in Ireland seeking land they eventually made their way inland, from 841 onwards, towards Leixlip. It was they who gave Leixlip its name: lax – meaning salmon - hlaup, or leap or lax-hløypa, for “salmon’s leaping place”. The Viking presence also lingers in local townland names, Blakestown and Ravensdale. They intermarried with the native Irish, were christianised and probably built the first houses in Leixlip. They were followed by the Anglo-Normans - Frenchmen, who were once Vikings, who had conquered Britain a century before they came to Ireland at the request of a disgruntled local king.

Richard de Clare - nicknamed Strongbow - the leading Anglo-Norman, gave a great swathe of north Kildare to the Norman knight, Sir Adam de Hereford. De Hereford shared it with his two brothers but kept Leixlip to himself. He took over the “castle” then owned by Macenlodher - meaning son or offspring of Lodher, a Dublin Viking. The round stone tower (donjon) of Leixlip Castle was built between 1181 and 1185. Norman knights at Lucan and Leixlip established Augustinian priories at St Catherine’s (where the Liffey Park is now) and at St Wolstan’s (near Young’s Cross).

St. Mary's (painted by Janet Colgan)

The parish Church of St Mary on the Main Street, the tower of which still stands, was built in the Norman period. A secret tunnel connected church to castle. The Normans settled the town with a small number of their own folk on sites with low rents and a form of self-government.

In 1494 king Henry VII granted the castle, manor and lordship of Leixlip to Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare, of Maynooth Castle; this gift was revoked in 1537 by Henry VIII. Henry VIII (he of the many wives) confiscated the monasteries at St Catherine’s and St Wolstan’s. By 1569 Elizabeth I agreed to grant the manors of Leixlip and St Catherine’s and much more to Waterford-born, Sir Nicholas Whyte. The Whytes settled in Leixlip until 1728, when Captain John Whyte, a land agent, sold the town to Donegal magnate, William Conolly, MP, then Speaker of the Irish Commons for £11,000 odd. The Whytes held important state offices and preferred to live at St Catherine’s.  

Francis Roantree (1829-1918)

Leixlip seldom featured in wars. Exceptionally there was an attack on the town in 1317 extending over a few days: it consisted of wanton destruction by Edward Bruce, younger brother of Robert Bruce, the self-proclaimed king of the Scots. Leixlip was unlucky: Bruce had been prevented from getting in to Dublin and so attacked Leixlip. Bruce destroyed St Mary’s Church, apart from its tower. During the 18th and 19th centuries the Castle was used for State purposes. Then much bigger, it was often occupied by militia and in the summertime by the Crown’s representative in Ireland. Many of the troops married local women. In the 19th century the secret, anti-establishment, Fenian movement was very strong in Leixlip. It was headed by William Francis Roantree (1829-1918), son of a Main Street butcher. Roantree had a colourful military career abroad, and retired to Ireland, living to see the Rising of 1916.

In 1794 the Royal Canal Company took their over-spent project as far as Leixlip. Thousands worked on the construction of an aqueduct – then the largest such project in Europe - to carry the canal across the river Rye at Collinstown, west Leixlip. They camped locally. A hot mineral spring was discovered near Louisa Bridge. Tom Conolly, the MP and owner of Leixlip, decided to build a spa hotel on the spot to accommodate the thousands of day trippers who came out the ‘take the waters’. He died before his project was finished, but the brick bathing place remains.

During the early years of the 20th century Leixlip men and women, headed by a local builder, James O’Neill (1890-1952), took part in the development of the ITGWU in reaction to low pay and very arduous working conditions. They marched, accompanied by the Leixlip Band, in protest at the 1913 Lock-Out and played a part in the establishment of the Irish Citizen Army. At 26 years of age O’Neill became Quarter Master General of the combined Irish Volunteers and ICA in the GPO at Easter, 1916. After James Connolly’s execution he succeeded him as Commandant of the ICA (1917-1922). He later emigrated and died in South Africa. Photo Of Salmon Leap (c1890)

Richard & Arthur Guinness - father and son – leased their first brewery premises on Reynor’s holding near the Liffey at Main Street in 1756, using a bequest of £100 apiece from their master and godfather, respectively, Arthur Price, Archbishop of Cashel, (d.1752) who lived at Celbridge. Arthur moved on to bigger and better things, eventually bringing black porter to his Dublin brewery. Because of its location on two rivers, Leixlip has attracted always industry which needed water for power - corn, paper, flock and other mills, distilleries; cotton printing and so on. Water was also used for processing – dye works, brewing, even making drinking water; and today Intel Ireland, the microprocessor maker, uses large quantities. Until modern times, the area was agricultural and had several stud farms. For centuries the town’s population scarcely reached 1,000 persons in ~150 houses. Now it is around 16,000 persons in over 5,500 houses. Most work in the services sector, often commuting to Dublin city. The First Leixlip Town Commisioners (c1988). Click on the image for an enlarged view of 1980's style

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