The Butlers of Ormond: Six Irish Castles of a Dynasty, from Kilkenny to Cahir

Portrait de famille

On 28 November 2026, the Yulefest Christmas market sets up on The Parade, the esplanade running alongside Kilkenny Castle, until 23 December. Visitors who stroll there will have before their eyes the home of a family that ruled south-east Ireland for nearly six hundred years: the Butlers. Their name derives neither from a place nor from an ancestor, but from a court office. At the end of the twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman knight Theobald Walter received the hereditary office of “butler” of Ireland, the royal cupbearer in charge of the king’s wines. His descendants turned it into a surname, then a title: Earls of Ormond from 1328, and Dukes of Ormonde in the seventeenth century (both spellings coexist). From Kilkenny to the banks of the Suir, their castles tell of a loyalty to the English Crown that was often dearly paid: sieges, forced sales and exile. Six of them, in the counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary, Carlow, Laois and Offaly, allow us to follow this history stone by stone.