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. School tradition has it that the portrait of Pontius Pilate in the 12th station was based on the school rector, who had refused to pay the artist his asking price. 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. The school traces its history back to a estate owned by the Wogan family in 1418 under the reign of Henry IV. The name "Clongowes" comes from the Irish for "meadow" ("cluain") and for "blacksmith" ("gobha"). The estate was originally known as "Clongowes de Silva" ("de Silva" meaning "of the wood" in Latin). The estate later passed to the Eustace family and became part of the fortified border of the Pale in 1494. The Eustaces lost their estates during the Restoration (1660). The estate was sold by the Wogan-Brownes to the Jesuits in March 1814 for £16,000. The school accepted its first pupil, James McLornan, on 18 May 1814. In 1886 the Jesuit-run St Stanislaus College in Tullabeg, County Offaly, was amalgamated with Clongowes Wood College. Leonard Maloney was the headmaster from 2004 to 2015. Michael Sheil retired as headmaster in 2006 and Bruce Bradley (headmaster 1992–2000) was his successor. In September 2011 Michael Sheil returned as rector. As of 2020, there are five Jesuits living at the school. Clongowes is also part of an initiative to ease religious tensions in Turkey, currently being headed by Fr. McGuckian in Istanbul. One early history of the school is "The Clongowes Record 1814–1932" by Fr Timothy Corcoran, S.J. (Browne and Nolan, Dublin, 1932). A half-century later, a history was written by Fr Roland Burke Savage, S.J., and published in "The Clongownian" school magazine during the 1980s; that same decade, Peter Costello wrote "Clongowes Wood: a History of Clongowes Wood College 1814–1989", published by Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1989).