Cork Butter Museum

The Cork Butter Exchange, founded in 1769, became the largest butter market in the world in the nineteenth century, exporting salted butter in firkins to Britain, the West Indies, South America and Australia, and it graded and certified every cask - an early and rigorous quality system that made the Cork brand worth something abroad. The trade shaped the city: the Shandon quarter around the museum was built on it. The museum covers that history, the co-operative movement that followed, and the making of Kerrygold as a national brand. Its oldest exhibit is a thousand-year-old lump of bog butter, buried in peat and recovered intact, which preserves because the bog is cold, acidic and oxygen-poor; it still smells, which visitors are invited to verify. It is small - one hour - occupies the old Butter Market building, and opening is seasonal, closing over winter.

History

The museum is in the former Cork Butter Market in Shandon, a building of 1849, in what had been the largest shambles, the open-air butcheries, in Ireland, and at the Exchange's peak in the 19th century Cork was the largest exporter of butter in the world (Wikipedia, Cork Butter Museum).

Highlights

• The bog butter - a thousand-year-old lump recovered from peat, and still smelling.
• The Butter Exchange - the grading system that made Cork butter an export brand.
• The firkins and equipment - the casks and tools of the nineteenth-century trade.
• The Kerrygold story - the co-operatives and the modern brand.

When to go

March to October; the museum closes for winter. An hour covers it. Combine it with Shandon Bells next door, which is the reason most people are on that hill.

Practical notes

Small and seasonal - closed over winter and easily done in an hour. It is a single-subject museum and the subject is butter, which not everyone finds compelling. Uphill walk from the city centre.

Nearby

Shandon Bells is beside the museum; Cork city centre is downhill across the river.

Key facts