The Cork Butter Market

Last Updated: 10th August, 2019

The Cork Butter Market located in the Shandon area of Cork city. The Museum describes the internationally important Butter Exchange in nineteenth century Cork, the traditional craft of home butter making and the modern success of the Kerrygold brand.

The Cork Butter Market was opened in 1770 and continued trading for 150 years bringing great wealth to Cork.

The gates of the market opened at 6.00 am every week day morning and the streets were busy with horse-drawn carts bringing butter to the market or carting it away to the local factories and waiting steamers on the quays.

The salted butter was brought to the market in wooden caskets called "firkins". Butter firkins were made of oak, sycamore or good hardwood with the best casks in the country being Cork-made ones, and these were compulsory for butter to be transported to tropical parts of the world.

Butter was brought by horse drawn cart from West Cork and Kerry along routes known as butter-roads.

Take the of Cork City Tour by bus which stops at St Anne's Shandon and just next door for the Cork Butter Museum, the North Catheral, St Finbarr's Cathedral and much more.