Edenderry native wins heritage writing award

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2020, the internationally acclaimed Listowel Writers Week held its prize giving ceremony online on Wednesday last owing to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions. Among the winners was Edenderry's Dr Ciarán Reilly, an academic at Maynooth University and native of Edenderry. His history book, 'Capard House: An Irish country house & estate' won the Nilsson Local Heritage Writing Award for 2020.

The book centres on Capard House, a house seldom featured on the trail of the travel writer or gazetteer, only briefly attracting attention during its elaborate construction in the late 1790s.

In many respects, Capard remained unknown to the outside world and lay in the shadow of the other great houses of Laois. However, the house and estate was central to the social, economic and political life of Rosenallis and the wider community over several hundred years.

Since 2015, Capard has undergone one of the largest restoration projects of an Irish country house to date. This book charts the history of Capard House and estate from the arrival of the Pigott family in Ireland in the 1560s to its present-day restoration. Lavishly illustrated throughout, the story of Capard challenges many of the stereotypical interpretations of the Irish country house.

Ciarán Reilly is an historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Irish history based at Maynooth University. His other books include The Irish Land Agent, 1830-60: the case of King’s County (2014); Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (2014); John Plunket Joly and the Great Famine in King’s County (2012) and Edenderry, county Offaly and the Downshire estate, 1790-1800 (2007) all published by Four Courts Press.

The book is available through the Irish Georgian Society https://shop.igs.ie/products/capard-an-irish-country-house-estate and the Offaly History Centre, Tullamore at https://www.offalyhistory.com/shop/books/capard-an-irish-country-house-and-estate