Clongowes Wood College SJ is a Catholic voluntary boarding school for boys near Clane, County Kildare, Ireland, founded by the Jesuits in 1814.

[6] The medieval castle was originally built in the 13th century by John de Hereford, an early Anglo-Norman warrior and landowner in North Kildare.

[7] He had been given extensive lands in the area of Kill, Celbridge and Mainham by his brother, Adam de Hereford, who had come to Ireland with 'Strongbow', the Earl of Pembroke.

The castle is connected to the modern buildings by an elevated corridor hung with portraits, the Serpentine Gallery referred to by James Joyce.

[10] The Boys' Chapel has an elaborate reredos, a large pipe organ in the gallery, and a sequence of Stations of the Cross painted by Sean Keating.

The moat that outlines the nearby forest of the college is the old border of The Pale, with the Wogan-Browne castle (now the residence of the Jesuit community) landmarking its edge.

Despite a relatively small size, Clongowes has won the Leinster Schools Rugby Senior Cup nine times, winning its first final in 1926.

A documentary depicting a year in the life in the school was screened in 2001 as part of RTÉ's True Lives series.

[50] The popular fictional series of Ross O'Carroll Kelly has mentioned Clongowes Wood on a number of occasions in the book and Irish Times column.