Waterville House, Waterville, Co Kerry 

Mark Bence-Jones. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London. 

p. 282. “(Butler, sub Dunboyne, B/PB) A plain two storey five bay late C18 or early C19 house with irregular wing at the back incorporating part of an earlier house.”

Not in national inventory

http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/property-list.jsp?letter=W

Caleb Chute was leasing a property valued at £18 to James Butler at the time of Griffith’s Valuation. Both Lewis, in 1837, and Leet in 1814, noted Waterville as the residence of James Butler .The Ordnance Survey Name Books described it as ” two stories high and in good repair” in 1840. Bary indicates that the house was built by the Butler family in the late eighteenth century and they resided there until 1965. It is now a luxury guesthouse with a golf links nearby.  

In O’Hea O’Keeffe, Jane. Voices from the Great Houses: Cork and Kerry. Mercier Press, Cork, 2013.

p. 271. In 1686 Rev Pierce Butler, grandson of Lord Dunboyne, became rector of the seven parishes in the barony of Iveragh in Co Kerry. He died in 1714 and his son Theobald Butler, who had been living in Priestown in County Meath, leased the valuable salmon fishery at Currane in south Kerry from Arthur Herbert of Brewsterfield, Killarney. Theobald Butler married Mary Whitwell, daughter of Sir Nathaniel Whitwell, a wine importer and lord mayor of Dublin. They came to live at Currane and Theobald Butler was appointed Justice of the Peace in Kerry.

In 1775 their son, Whitwell Butler (1743-1807) , an officer in the Royal Navy, built Waterville House on the site of an earlier building at the mouth of the Currane River. He also erected Belville House on the shore of the Valentia channel at Portmagee. He married Belinda Yielding, daughter of Richard Yielding of Rathkeale and Tralee. On his death in 1807 he was succeeded by his son James Butler (1780-1863), an energetic and hard-working man, who [p.272] enlarged and improved the Waterville estate. He was the owner of the Skelligs, two pyramids of rock which rise dramatically out of the Atlantic to the west of the Iveragh Peninsula, and he took great care to preserve the early Christian monastery on the Great Skellig. In 1820 the government purchased the rock from James Butler for £800. He was appointed deputy lieutenant and Justice of the Peace for Kerry, and in 1817 he married Agnes Day, daugther of Rev John Day of Kiltallagh. Their eldest son James (1820-87), a fluent Irish speaker, married Anne Margaret Green Davis of Killeagh in east Cork in 1849. He owned over 1,400 acres in Kerry in the 1870s and at this time, his sister Arabella Butler who lived at Waterville was the proprietor of over 700 acres.

Waterville House was entailed, which meant that it could only be passed to certain heirs, and when it was taken over by the eldest son, James Whitwell Butler (b.1897), his parents resettled in west Cork. The house was sold in 1963, but the Butler family were not to cut their ties with Kerry. The second Butler son, Edward Theobald “Teddy” Butler, bought a house in Derrynane where he farmed and fished, and where he and his wife were very content. The also retained their home in Tipperary, where their daughter Jennifer Butler and her sisters grew up. [Anner House, Cloneen, Co Tipp]