Taghadoe Round Tower and Church

In a roadside graveyard about three kilometres south of Maynooth stands one of Kildare's five round towers, on the monastery founded in the eighth century by St Tua, known as Ultan the Silent, abbot of Clonmacnoise. The limestone tower rises five storeys to almost twenty metres, lit by one window on each level and entered by a doorway three and a half metres above the ground; it has lost its conical cap but is otherwise remarkably well preserved. In the 19th century its ground floor was used to store coal, until it became a national monument in 1886. Beside it is the shell of a church built in 1831 with an £830 gift from the Board of First Fruits, rectangular with an octagonal turret at each corner, and abandoned in 1871 for want of parishioners. Reviewers find the site immaculately kept but small: the tower cannot be entered, while the roofless church can be walked into. Drivers are asked not to block the farm gate.