Buttevant (Irish: Cill na Mullach, meaning 'church of the summits'; Latin: Ecclesia Tumulorum) is a medieval market town in County Cork, Ireland.

Edmund Spenser, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), gives an early example of the modern name and associates it with Mullagh, his name for the river Awbeg:[10] The Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels contains the manuscript of Father Donatus Mooney's report on the Irish Province of the Franciscans compiled in 1617/1618 in which he notes that the place "is called 'Buttyfanie' and, in Irish, 'Kilnamullagh' or 'Killnamallagh'".

Philip O'Sullivan Beare in his Historiae Catholicae Iberniae, published in Spain in 1620, gives the name 'Killnamollacham' for the town and translates it into Latin as 'Ecclesia Tumulorum'.

James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde refers to "Buttiphante" in a letter of January 1684 (Carte Manuscripts, Bodleian, 161, f. 47v), while Sir John Percival, progenitor of the Earls of Egmont, recorded in his diary for 16 March 1686 that the troopers "being att Buttevant Fair this day took Will Tirry and his wife and brought them hither and I examined them".

The most important markets and all fairs were associated with the major boroughs and can be used as a gauge of their economic and social significance as also the 1301 quo warranto proceedings in Cork at which John de Barry "claimed the basic baronial jurisdiction of gallows, infangetheof, vetitia namia and fines for shedding blood (where 'Englishmen' were involved) in his manors of Buttevant, Castlelyons, Rathbarry and Lislee".

[citation needed] The development of the settlement followed a pattern frequently repeated in the Norman colonies of North Cork and Limerick.

Early colonial sites, such as Buttevant and Castletownroche, saw the introduction of the more traditional monastic communities which were housed in foundations outside of the town walls.

The Augustinian priories of Bridgetown (ante 1216) and Ballybeg (1229) being respectively founded by the Roches and the de Barry contiguous to the settlements of Castletownroche and Buttevant.

[citation needed] The burgage of Buttevant developed to the north of the keep and eventually increased in size to about 50 acres (200,000 m2) enclosed by walls for which Murage grants had been made by the crown in 1317.

of Edward II of England, John fitz David de Barry requested and obtained from the exchequer a grant of £105 for the commonality and town of Buttevant for its walling.

The steeplechase originated in 1752 as a result of a horse race from the steeple of Buttevant Protestant church to that of Doneraile, four miles (6 km) away.

[16] The barracks was divided into three quadrangles and hosted an extensive range of buildings and facilities, including a gymnasium, training field, church, school, stables and a parade ground.

The campus or compound, a great green square surrounded by the quarters....often with lawn tennis and cricket going on in its centre and there are always the officers wives and children giving the scene a touch of charm'.

Back of this is another square, surrounded by a large barracks, while the married man have a separate building beyond these and the colonel lives in a retired pleasant house off in one corner'.

[14] Buttevant also has many literary associations: Edmund Spenser, from his manor at Kilcolman,[18] referred to it and the gentle Mullagh (the Awbeg River) in The Faerie Queen ; Anthony Trollope passed through in his novel Castle Richmond; James Joyce played a game of hurling there in his Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; the revered Canon Sheehan of Doneraile mentions Buttevant in several of his novels, not least in Glenanaar in the setting of the fatal events of the Fair of Rathclare; and Elizabeth Bowen mentions it in her elegiacal family history Bowen's Court.

Buttevant was the setting of the "Bunworth Banshee", a supernatural occurrence documented in Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1828).

[citation needed] In the Irish language, Peadar Ó Laoghaire makes unflattering mention of garrisoned Buttevant in Mo Scéal Féin.

The 18th-century Irish antiquarian, Séamus Ó Conaire, one-time member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, is buried westward facing outside of the friary portal.

At 12:45 a CIÉ express train from Dublin to Cork entered Buttevant station at 70 mph (110 km/h) carrying some 230 Bank Holiday passengers.

The scale and impact of the accident meant that CIÉ, and the government, came under pressure to improve safety and modernise the rail fleet.