Editing Celbridge (section)

===Kildrought to Celbridge===
The present day houses in Celbridge Main Street and town centre were built over a period of two hundred years. [[Celbridge Abbey]] was built in 1703 by a Dutch Williamite emigre, [[Esther Vanhomrigh|Bartholmew Van Homrigh]]. He was appointed Chief Commissioner for Stores in Ireland for the victorious allied forces of [[William III of England|William III]] and [[Mary II of England|Mary II]] who defeated the [[Jacobitism|Jacobite]] alliance, and enforced the [[Treaty of Limerick]] in 1691. He moved to Kildrought Manor in 1695. When [[William Conolly|William "Speaker" Conolly]] purchased the rundown Castletown Estate in 1709 from [[Thomas Dongan]], the restored [[Earl of Limerick]] and later [[List of colonial governors of New York|Governor of New York]], he complained that "all the Earl's tenants were beggars". Conolly built his new mansion at Castletown, cleared the existing tenantry and began to develop the town. Improvers and speculative developers followed Conolly to Celbridge. The new leases were granted on condition that the builders erect substantial stone houses with gable ends and two chimneys, replacing mud cabins and waste ground.	
		
Existing mercantile buildings such as the 17th-century [[List of market houses in the Republic of Ireland|Market House]], where the town's first school was based in 1709, were incorporated into the expanding mill complex of buildings near the bridge. Developers began to survey e green field sites to the north east of the bridge in the direction of Castletown House. The result was to move the axis of Celbridge away from the bridge, corn and tuck mill and road to St Mochua's church to a new Main Street.	
		
The old Irish name Cill Droichid (Kildrought), meaning the church of the bridge, was anglicised first to Cellbridge and then, after 1724, to Celbridge. Swift in his letters to [[Esther Vanhomrigh|Vanessa]] always named the place "Kildrought", but she replied from "Celbridge".

Celbridge's 18th-century bridge had to be rebuilt after it was destroyed in a flood in December 1802.<ref>The Morning Chronicle (London, England), Friday, 10 December 1802; Issue 10471.</ref>