Cliff at Lyons

A Liffey-side Kildare town built up around Castletown House, Ireland's largest and earliest Palladian mansion.

Celbridge grew up alongside the Castletown estate on the banks of the River Liffey, and the town still carries the mark of it: the Conolly family, who built the house, had the main street laid out to a standard of quality that still shows in its Georgian frontages today. It sits close enough to Dublin to be an easy day-trip base, but keeps a village feel of its own.

Castletown House itself, built from 1722 for William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, is the reason to come. It's a vast Palladian house of around a hundred rooms set in landscaped parkland running down to the Liffey, now in State care and open to visitors, with the grounds free to walk any day. The town also has a quieter literary footnote: Celbridge Abbey, on the river just outside the town, was the childhood home of Esther Vanhomrigh, immortalised as "Vanessa" by Jonathan Swift, and the garden folly known as Vanessa's Bower still stands in its grounds.

For a B&B stay, that combination of a major historic house, riverside walking in the Castletown parkland and Celbridge Abbey grounds, and quick access into Dublin along the M4/N4, makes Celbridge a practical base for touring both the capital and the Kildare countryside.