Kilkenny Castle

• 1. Introduction

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  Kilkenny Castle sold for fifty pounds in 1967. Not fifty thousand, not fifty million. Fifty pounds. That exchange between Arthur Butler, 6th Marquess of Ormonde, and the Castle Restoration Committee is one of the more quietly extraordinary transactions in Irish history. A castle built in 1260, fought over by Cromwell's armies, occupied by Confederate Ireland's rebel parliament, and home to a grandmother of Anne Boleyn, changed hands for the price of a modest meal. How did a structure so central to eight centuries of Irish life end up abandoned and deteriorating? And what did it take to bring it back?

• 2. Stone on a River Crossing

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  Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, better known to history as Strongbow, put the first castle at this site, probably a wooden structure, sometime in the 12th century. The Anglo-Normans had established a foothold here by 1173, possibly building on the site of an earlier residence of the Mac Giolla Phádraig kings of Osraighe. Kilkenny fell within the lordship of Leinster, which was granted to Strongbow himself.

  Strongbow's daughter Isabel married William Marshall in 1189, and the estate passed into Marshall's capable hands. He managed large holdings across Ireland, England, Wales, and France. In 1192 he appointed Geoffrey FitzRobert as seneschal of Leinster, beginning a serious phase of development in Kilkenny. The first stone castle on the site was completed in 1260. It was square-shaped, with towers at each of its four corners; three of those original towers still stand.

  The castle was built to do a specific job: control a fording-point of the River Nore and the junction of several routeways. It also functioned as part of the town's broader defences. A massive ditch ran around the structure, part of which is still visible today on the Parade. Excavations in 2019 by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil uncovered the foundations of the great gatehouse that William Marshal had built in the early 1200s, confirming just how ambitious the original construction had been.

• 3. The Butler Dynasty

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  The Butler family arrived in Ireland with the Norman invasion, having changed their name from FitzWalter in 1185. They originally settled in Gowran, where James Butler, 3rd Earl of Ormond built Gowran Castle in 1385. Six years later, James bought Kilkenny Castle for the family, establishing himself as ruler of the surrounding area. Many members of the family, including James himself, are buried in St. Mary's Collegiate Church Gowran.

  Among the most remarkable of the Butlers was Lady Margaret Butler, born around 1454 or 1465 in Kilkenny Castle itself. She was the daughter of Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond. Lady Margaret married Sir William Boleyn and became the paternal grandmother of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII of England. A castle on the River Nore was, in some indirect way, part of the family tree of Tudor England's most turbulent royal marriage.

  The Butlers ruled the surrounding area for centuries. The castle passed through the family under very different circumstances in the 17th century, when it fell to Elizabeth Preston, wife of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Unlike most of his family, Butler was a Protestant.

• 4. Rebels, Sieges, Exile

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  Confederate Ireland's parliament, known as the "Supreme Council", met in Kilkenny Castle from 1642 to 1648. The castle had become the capital of a Catholic rebel movement even while the Protestant Butler himself was based in Dublin as Charles I's representative during the Irish Confederate Wars. The castle's walls held both a seat of royal authority and its opposition simultaneously, in different senses.

  In 1650, Oliver Cromwell arrived. His siege of Kilkenny during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland damaged the east wall and the northeast tower. Both were later torn down. When Butler returned from exile in 1661, he remodelled the castle in the style of a "modern" chateau, deliberately updating its appearance to match continental fashions of the time.

  By the 18th century, the family's fortunes had declined and the castle had grown run-down. Some restoration was carried out by Anne Wandesford of Castlecomer, who brought wealth back into the family when she married John Butler, 17th Earl of Ormonde. In the 19th century the Butlers attempted to restore it to a medieval appearance, rebuilding the north wing and extending the south curtain wall. More extensions followed in 1854. King Edward VII and his wife Queen Alexandra visited in 1904.

• 5. The Long Decline

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  In the 1880s and 1890s, the nominal annual income from the Ormonde Settled Estates in Ireland was approximately £44,000, but agricultural depression meant actual income ran closer to £22,000. Lady Ormonde is recorded as startling a guest at a Castle Ball by remarking that "we are very poor." The remark carried weight. By the 1930s, investment income had fallen to around £9,000. By 1950, it had collapsed to roughly £850.

  The Ormonde landed estates had spanned about 27,800 acres across Tipperary and Kilkenny in the 1880s. In 1903, they were sold for £240,000 under the Wyndham Land Act. What remained was the 95-acre demesne around the castle, roughly 700 acres at the Dunmore home farm, and around 3,500 acres of mountain forest at the family's hunting lodge at Ballyknockane, Tipperary.

  The 1911 census recorded seventeen servants living at the castle as part of Lord and Lady Ormonde's household: a valet, two footmen, a chauffeur, a housekeeper, a cook, a lady's maid, four housemaids, a still room maid, a scullery maid, a kitchen maid, and two dairy maids. Additional servants lived in adjacent properties on The Parade. Death duties after James Butler, 3rd Marquess of Ormonde died in 1919 amounted to £166,000. In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Republicans were besieged in the castle by Irish Free State forces. The Ormondes chose to stay in their bedroom over the great gate during the attack, with a machine gun outside their door. One man was injured; the castle sustained damage that took years to repair.

  George Butler, Earl of Ossory and his family left in 1935, selling the contents for £6,000 and abandoning the castle for thirty years. Antony Butler, Viscount Thurles died unexpectedly in 1940, and through the successive deaths of the 4th Marquess in 1943 and the 5th Marquess in 1949, the castle eventually passed to Arthur Butler, 6th Marquess.

• 6. Fifty Pounds and a Fresh Start

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  Arthur Butler, 6th Marquess of Ormonde, sold the abandoned and deteriorating castle to the Castle Restoration Committee in 1967 for £50, a figure understood on both sides as ceremonial. His statement at the handover was direct: "The people of Kilkenny, as well as myself and my family, feel a great pride in the Castle, and we have not liked to see this deterioration. We determined that it should not be allowed to fall into ruins. There are already too many ruins in Ireland." He also purchased the land in front of the castle from the trustees himself so that it would never be built on and the castle could be seen, as he put it, "in all its dignity and splendour."

  The handover ceremony also marked the founding of the Butler Society, an organisation that continues to connect members of the Butler family and preserve its history. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull attended the castle handover party. Jagger told the newspapers: "We just came to loon about."

  The castle and grounds are now managed by the Office of Public Works. The gardens and parkland are open to the public. The Parade Tower functions as a conference venue. Since 2002, graduates of the Kilkenny Campus of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, have received their awards and degrees in ceremonies held at the castle.

• 7. What the Ground Holds

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  Excavations by Ben Murtagh in the 1990s opened a more complex picture of the site's layered past. Murtagh's surveys exposed traces of an earlier castle, uncovered a postern gate and a section of the castle ditch facing the Parade (now visible to visitors), and partly revealed the lost south-east side of the castle. Original stone buttressing and a garderobe were also uncovered.

  The Butler Gallery, previously housed in the basement of the castle, has since moved to the redeveloped Evans' Home, a former almshouse built in the 19th century for impoverished domestic servants. It now hosts rotating exhibitions put on by the Kilkenny Art Gallery Society, in a venue named for Peggy and Hubert Butler.

  One further distinction belongs to the castle's grounds. Ireland's highest officially recognised air temperature, 33.3 degrees Celsius, was recorded at Kilkenny Castle on the 26th of June 1887. The building at the centre of so much political and dynastic history also holds a place in the country's meteorological record.