Kildare — Brigid’s Oak

Kildare takes its name from Cill Dara, ‘church of the oak’, after the monastery St Brigid founded in the fifth century beneath a great oak tree that once stood at the heart of the town.

This is the Curragh, the open plain that has bred and trained Ireland’s finest racehorses for centuries — a county where the short grass, as the old saying goes, is the sweetest in the world.