What is "bodenstown"

Bodenstown is a townland on the outskirts of Sallins in County Kildare, Ireland, coordinates 53.262572, -6.665906.

The most notable local features are a golf club and the parish cemetery for Sallins. The cemetery is best known as the gravesite of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the eighteenth-century Irish revolutionary and leader of the Society of the United Irishmen. Commemorations are held at the grave every June by various parties of the Irish Republican tradition. These commemorations were begun by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the late nineteenth century.

A ballad, "Tone's Grave," popularly known as " Bodenstown churchyard", written by the radical journalist Thomas Davis, celebrates and commemorates the life of Wolfe Tone. In the first verse, Davis wrote:

In Bodenstown churchyard there is a green grave,
And wildly around it the winter winds rave;
Small shelter, I ween, are the ruined walls there
When the storm sweeps down on the plains of Kildare.
Once I lay on that sod it lies over Wolfe Tone
And thought how he perished in prison alone,
His friends unavenged and his country unfreed

Category:Towns and villages in County Kildare