Sold-out talk on the burning of country houses in Offaly

A sold-out talk on the burning of country houses in Offaly will take place tonight (April 14) as part of a series of lectures hosted by the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates, History Department, Maynooth University, and supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Historical Strand of the Decade of Centenaries Programme. 

These talks run in tandem with the exhibition Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in Revolution, 1920-23, hosted by the Irish Architectural Archives from 21 March to 29 April 2022, and Maynooth University Library in May 2022. 

Dr Ciarán Reilly’s talk is entitled ‘A smouldering mass of charred stones’: The burning of Big Houses in Offaly, 1920-1923’ and is one of nine lectures held online between March and May of this year.  

In 1980 the elderly Martin Walsh recalled witnessing the burning of Leap Castle in County Offaly in July 1922. In addition to the helplessness that he and other estate employees felt as flames took hold of one of Offaly’s most significant Big Houses, he also remembered how local crowds gathered on the lawn in front of the castle as its contents were piled high outside, ‘You’d think there was going to be an auction’, he observed.

Leap Castle was just one of fourteen houses destroyed in Offaly during the years 1920-23, while several others were partially burned, attacked, and looted. Using Leap Castle as a case study, this talk will explore the reasons why Offaly houses were attacked during this troubled period.  

Already there is widespread interest in the talk and many people were disappointed that the series is booked out. It is envisaged that this talk will be delivered in county Offaly locally as part of the Decade of the Commemorations as many of these burnings occurred 100 years ago this year. It will be part of the Edenderry Historical Society lecture series later this year.  

Ciarán Reilly is an historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland based at Maynooth University, and a former Research Fellow with the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates.

He has particular interest in the Great Irish Famine; country houses; landed estates; and the Irish Revolution, 1912-23. His books include: The Irish Land Agent, 1830-60: the case of King’s County (2014); Strokestown and the Great Famine (2014); and he has edited with Lowri Ann Rees and Annie Tindley, The Land Agent, 1700-1920 (2018).