Overview
Ballitore is the only planned, permanent Quaker village in Ireland. Two Quakers from Yorkshire, John Bancroft and Abel Strettel, laid it out on a grid in the early 1700s, and the square, the meeting house and the plain stone houses are still much where they put them. It sits in south County Kildare near the Wicklow border, on the River Greese. There isn’t a great deal to do beyond the museum and a riverside walk, but for anyone curious about how a settlement was deliberately built around a set of beliefs - simplicity, honesty, equality - it repays a slow hour.
The Quaker school
Bancroft and Strettel turned the valley into farmland and built wool and flour mills on the Greese, but the settlement’s lasting mark was educational. In 1726 Abraham Shackleton opened a Quaker boarding school that ran until 1836 and was, for much of that time, the only school in Ireland offering more than a basic education - it taught modern languages by the 1780s and usually held 50 to 60 pupils. It took Protestant and Catholic boys alike, and its best-known pupil was the philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke; the future Cardinal Paul Cullen was another. Three generations of Shackletons ran it.
Mary Leadbeater and the museum
The heart of the village is the Mary Leadbeater House, now the Ballitore Library and Quaker Museum. Leadbeater, a granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, was a poet and diarist, and her Annals of Ballitore, kept from 1766 to 1824, is one of the best first-hand accounts of ordinary Irish life across the 1798 Rebellion and the years around it. The museum, free to enter, shares its building with the restored Quaker Meeting House, still used for Sunday worship, and holds local history, Shackleton family papers and Leadbeater manuscripts.
Note the hours before you plan a trip: it opens Wednesday, Friday and Saturday and for a stretch on Thursday, and it’s shut Sunday, Monday and Tuesday - so a weekend visit needs a Saturday.
Around the village
Ballitore is best seen on foot. The square is largely unchanged behind its Georgian fronts. Just off it, the Shaker Store - an old family house now selling wooden crafts - carries a cut-stone plaque, put up in 1998, to Owen Finn, a local shot during the 1798 Rebellion. The Quaker graveyard nearby is worth finding for the contrast with a typical Irish burial ground: walled, and marked with plain, uniform slabs rather than headstones, in keeping with the Quaker idea of equality in death.
For a longer walk, the path along the River Greese passes the ruins of Ballitore Mill and is flat and easy, good for families and dogs. On the way you pass Griesebank House, built around 1700, where in the early 1990s Mary Ann O’Brien started what became Lily O’Brien’s Chocolates - reputedly out of the kitchen.
Nearby
- Moone - a few kilometres south, home to the Moone High Cross, one of the finest early-medieval crosses in the country.
- Castledermot - a round tower, high crosses and a Romanesque doorway, a little further down the N9.
- Athy - a market town on the River Barrow, with the Shackleton Museum and its Antarctic collection.
Practical information
Getting there - Ballitore sits just off the M9 motorway, on the R448. A Local Link bus serves the village and connects it to Athy, Castledermot and Carlow, but check the current timetable rather than turning up on spec.
Parking and facilities - free car parking, including coach parking and toilets, at the Library and Quaker Museum, with street parking on the peripheral roads. The village is flat and largely wheelchair- and buggy-friendly, including the riverside path.
Opening hours and entry - the museum opens Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 10am–1pm and 2pm–5pm, and Thursday, 12.30pm–4pm and 4.45pm–8pm; it’s closed Monday, Tuesday and Sunday. Entry is free, though a donation toward the collection is welcome.
Go on a Friday or Saturday morning, do the museum first while it’s quiet, then take the Greese path down past the mill.