Clongowes Wood College

Clongowes Wood College is a prestigious boys-only secondary school in County Kildare, Ireland run by the Society of Jesus (The Jesuits) since 1814, making it one of Ireland's oldest Catholic schools. The school featured prominently in James Joyce's semiautobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Related Topics:
Clongowes Wood College - County Kildare - Ireland - Jesuits - Catholic - James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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It currently has 450 students. 2004 is Clongowes' 190th academic year.

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A history of the college was written by Fr. Roland Burke Savage S.J. and published in 1987.

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Aspects of life at Clongowes include the following:

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• there are six class or year forms, namely Rudiments Grammar, Syntax, Humanities, Poetry and Rhetoric. These are grouped into three Lines - Third, Lower and Higher.
• the ditch at the front of the Castle is called the Golly Mocky;
• the medieval castle, which is the residence of the religious community, was improved by a "chocolate box" type restoration in the 19th century (fashionable at the time); it is situated astride the Ramparts, which are the ditch and wall constructed for the defense of the Pale in the 14th century;
• the castle is connected to the modern buildings by an elevated corridor hung with portraits, the Serpentine Gallery referred to by James Joyce;
• the Boys' Chapel has an elaborate reredos, a large pipe-organ in the gallery, and an interesting sequence of Stations of the Cross painted by Sean Keating. The Stations are framed only by the arches in which they sit, and it is said that Keating avenged the Rector's refusal to pay for proper frames by painting a Pontius Pilate who looked suspiciously like the Rector.
• there is a 19th century Pleasure Grounds, where pupils first dare to smoke cigarettes - they then graduate to the Green Room and the back wall of the theatre stage, until they end up brazenly puffing away in the toilets at 11.15 am break-time and then at 4.05 pm, when everybody else has gone out to practise rugby in the rain;
• most of the cigarettes are bought in the nearby village of Clane, the inhabitants of which are referred to as Claneites;
• the kick-off chant used by supporters at Leinster Senior Cup rugby games is the Wumba (spelling disputed), which is probably a war chant from the sub-continent of colonial India;
• on first entering the college, people are struck by the straightness of the tree-lined avenue, and then their conversation turns to Dutch elm disease and what is to be done when the trees all die;
• there is a nine-hole golf course, and pupils have to climb an enormous hill to reach the second tee and light their cigarettes;
• one of the rugby pitches is called the Cabbage Patch;
• Rhetoric block, where final year pupils are housed, was built in the nineteen seventies and is said to have a structural fault ("a giant crack") running through it.
 
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