Kiltalown House is a late 18th / early 19th century Georgian house located in the townland of Kiltalown () near Jobstown in Tallaght, situated at the foot of the Dublin Mountains in Dublin, Ireland. Since 2005, the house has been used by a drug and alcohol rehabilitation organisation as their local community headquarters.
The house was built c.1800 at a time when Tallaght was still just a small village on the outskirts of Dublin city, and the lands around it primarily agricultural. The house went through a number of owners through the decades, with the last private owner being a Mr. W. Jolley in early 1987. Around May 1987, the house came into use in a public capacity, possibly as the result of having been purchased by Dublin County Council, and began to be used as a location for counselling services. It suffered dereliction at some point during this transition of ownership, and was damaged by fire in 1988. The house was repaired by FÁS and subsequently used as a base for unemployed people, and then a holistic therapy centre, before being requisitioned as the headquarters of a local drug and alcohol rehabilitation organisation in July 2005, by whom it is still used today. The surviving demesne lands which surround the house have been repurposed as a public park named Kiltalown Park.
In 2002, the house was described by architectural historian Michael Fewer as "one of the few smaller country houses around Tallaght to (have) survive(d) the sweeping developments of the 1970s and 1980s".
Pre-history Cist grave The earliest evidence of human activity in the Kiltalown area dates from the Bronze Age (c.2400-500BC).
In June 1848, John Lentaigne presented to the Royal Irish Academy "some portions of a skeleton, an urn, and a fragment of another, all found on the townland of Kiltalown, close to the boundary of Killinarden". The remains had been found the previous week by a tenant of the land, named Mr. Quin, who had been clearing furze at the time.
In his book The Bronze Age Burials of Ireland (1990), John Waddell noted that bowl and skeletal remains had been unearthed "under a low mound" in the Kiltalown townland. A large stone-lined pit containing cremated bones was also found nearby.
In 1848, an intact urn, as well as a fragment of a larger one, were uncovered in the townland of Kiltalown "near the top of the ridge of Tallaght Hill." The finds were stored in the National Museum, Dublin as of 1877. Handcock described the intact urn, No. 93, as "a perfect and highly decorated bowl-shaped vessel, probably a food-holder. The ornamentation consists of vertical, horizontal, and wavy lines".
Standing stone Kiltalown is the site of one of only four standing stones in the area of South Dublin. The stone is located 150m to the south-west of the house in Kiltalown Park, but is today only a stump. In May 1996, Brian Hayes, a Fine Gael politician, noted that the standing stone was "between 5,000 and 6,000 years old", and that the "inclination and axis of the stone point(ed) to 19 extensive monuments recently found on Tallaght Hill." Minister of State at the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Donal Carey explained further: The second item is a granite standing stone, just over one metre in height, which is located west of Kiltalown House in an area where there are a number of Bronze Age burials. It is positioned similarly to the nearest standing stones at Boherboy, that is, on relatively level grassland at the base of the foothills.
The stone was knocked over in October 1996 ("a recent incident of vandalism resulted in the displacement of the stone"), with it becoming "apparent that it had been sitting on its flat base with no evidence for a socket". The stone was excavated in February 1997, but "nothing of an archaeological nature was found, which might suggest that it was a boundary marker", according to the South Dublin County Development Plan 2022-2028. Rónán Swan of Arch-Tech Ltd., who carried out the excavation at the time, had the following notes: The excavation programme was carried out in February 1997. A single cutting measuring 3.5m by 4m was manually excavated around the standing stone. The sod layer was removed, revealing a reddish-brown ploughsoil 0.1–0.2m thick. Below this ploughsoil the surface of the natural deposits was revealed. In order to verify these natural deposits, a test-pit was excavated in the centre of the cutting, to a depth of 0.3m. There was no indication of any archaeological deposits or features associated with the standing stone. Thus there is no evidence to suggest that this standing stone is of archaeological significance.
The website megalithicmonumentsofireland.com catalogued the stone in 2012, noting the following information: This standing stone now lies recumbent in the grounds of Kilalown House, just off the Blessington road. It is almost covered over in grass and soil and a large portion has been broken off. It measures about 1.6m in length and is composed of granite.
The website themodernantiquarian.com reviewed the stone in 2014, noting that the letters KC R.I.P. had been etched into it very deeply, presumably as a memorial to a deceased person.
Kiltalown church A church originally existed on the site of Kiltalown House, but the "foundations were removed" in the early 19th century to facilitate construction of the house.
In the 1997 article "The Medieval Parish Churches of South-West County Dublin", Máirín Ní Mharcaigh noted that the parish of Tallaght comprised 21,868 acres, being by far the largest in the area. The next largest parish in south-west County Dublin was that of Clondalkin with 4,934 acres. The Tallaght parish possessed a central "parish church" at Tallaght village and then "subsidiary churches" at Killinarden, Killininny, Kilmesantan (succeeded by Templeogue), Kilnamanagh and Kiltalown.
Ní Mharcaigh noted that these ordinary parish churches had (by 1997) been overlooked by academia, and that "many of these buildings have already been lost through neglect and vandalism and it is desirable that a detailed record should be made of those remaining before they also disappear". The small parish churches, such as that at Kiltalown, were, for the most part, "small and rather plain and did not always reflect fashionable architectural styles."
Ní Mharcaigh noted that "surviving architectural features (were) relatively sparse" amongst the medieval parish churches of the region, and that "few of the churches survived in use to the end of the seventeenth century", meaning that Kiltalown church may have already been a ruin by the time it was demolished, and upon which Kiltalown House was constructed: Plague, famines and intermittent warfare depleted the population, with consequent effect on their churches, but the advent of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was responsible for the end of many of them. Parishes with few parishioners (and many recusants) were unable to support the churches; they were united with other parishes and their churches fell into disuse. In all of the subsidiary churches, and in the parish churches of Ballyfermot, Kilbride and Kilmahuddrick, liturgical services had ceased by 1615, or the churches had been abandoned. Cruagh, Esker, Palmerston, Saggart and the chancel of Lucan were ruinous by 1630. Of the remainder, there is no further record. Most of the subsidiary churches and some of the parish churches have disappeared almost entirely without trace. Of the eighteen parish churches and eleven other churches, only the church of Newcastle is still in use."
In his 1985 work, All Roads Lead to Tallaght, archaeologist Paddy Healy noted the existence of the original church, claiming that its foundations had been "torn up" around 1822 "for the purpose of building": There was an old church here which was mentioned also by O'Curry in 1837. Not a vestige then survived, the foundations having been torn up fifteen years earlier for the purpose of building by a Mr. Carpenter of Dublin. Unfortunately, O'Curry did not record exactly where this church stood, but since the house built by Mr. Carpenter, Kiltalown House, is still standing it was probably somewhere close to it.
Holy well As of 1904, a well named 'St. Paul's well' existed in the townland of Kiltalown, as noted by academic Francis Elrington Ball in his A History of the County of Dublin (Part Third).
A holy well is known to exist in the adjacent townland of Killinardan, as identified in the South Dublin County Development Plan 2004-2010.
Pale ditch / medieval enclosure A linear earthwork runs along the southern boundary of Kiltalown House in "varying states of preservation" that has been noted by the National Monuments Service to resemble that of the Pale ditch (constructed between 1499 to 1494) as similarly identified elsewhere in South County Dublin.
Since the time of the Norman invasion of Ireland, the region of south County Dublin closest to the Dublin Mountains had been associated with defensive earthworks and castles due to "its proximity to Irish attackers who used the Dublin foothills and the Wicklow Mountains (the same mountain range as the Dublin mountains) as their base."
In May 1996, Brian Hayes, a Fine Gael politician, noted that there had been two major and recent archaeological finds in Kiltalown "in the last year" which had come to the attention of the National Monuments Service, one being the Pale ditch, "180 metres long", and the other being Kiltalown standing stone. The sites had been brought to the attention of the National Monuments Service by a heritage awareness group in Tallaght. Donal Carey, explained more regarding the finds: The first is a linear earthwork in two sections which is similar in form to the sections of the Pale ditch identified at Balally and Ballyogan in South County Dublin. It is characteristically located at the foot of the Dublin Mountains. This accords with the account given by Ball. There is a local tradition in Tallaght that the Pale ditch ran through the grounds of the Dominican Priory in the village (Tallaght village). It is probable that it continued further west as there was a castle at Jobstown in 1654 and Kiltalown House was built on the site of an early church.
A survey and small-scale excavation of a tree-lined earthwork at Kiltalown House was carried out in March 1998, after having been reported to the National Monuments and Historic Properties Service in early 1996 by a local study association named the 'Heritage Awareness Group'. The aim of the work was to establish the archaeological significance of the earthwork, and ascertain whether it might have been part of the Pale boundary earthwork, before the proposed widening of the Tallaght-Blessington road (part of the N81), which runs along its southern part, was carried out.
Excavations uncovered a "posthole on the top of the bank which suggest(ed) evidence for a timber palisade" having possibly existed there. In summary, the excavation notes revealed that: The Kiltalown earthwork belongs to the late medieval tradition of protective enclosure that reaches its apogee in the attempted enclosure of the English Pale in 1494–5, and the identification of it as part of the Pale is a reasonable one, but it may equally have enclosed an area of medieval parkland.
In the draft landscape character assessment (LCA) of South Dublin County commissioned in 2021 as part of the South Dublin County Development Plan 2022-2028, it was noted that "excavations at Kiltalown uncovered a late medieval earthwork interpreted by the excavator as a likely stretch of the Pale boundary" but could alternatively have been remnants of "enclosure features of medieval parkland."
Heritage park feasibility In 1996, the feasibility of developing a heritage park at Kiltalown was considered, in light of recent archaeological finds, and ongoing lack of community morale and chronic need of employment in the area. The subject was raised in the Houses of the Oireachtas.