and there are always the officers wives and children giving the scene a touch of charm'. He continues by writing, 'on top of the entrance arch are the offices, on the right of the guardhouse and beyond it a large gymnasium. On either side of the green and running at right angles to the entrance are the officers' quarters. While a large barracks for the men forms the fourth side of the square. 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'. Support required for the everyday running barracks was immense. The barracks provided important commerce for the town and it is estimated that up to the 20th century it is estimated that up to 70% of the towns income came from the barracks. Throughout World War I thousands of men were processed through the barracks before being sent elsewhere. Later, during the Irish War of Independence the barracks was an important staging point for British forces. With the departure of British forces at the end of the Irish War of Independence, the barracks was abandoned. It was later temporarily occupied by both anti-treaty and pro-treaty parties and was eventually burned and destroyed during the Irish Civil War. Today, evidence of the barracks is all but gone, with only an incomplete perimeter wall and the entrance to the barracks still remaining. The area where the barracks stood is now divided into three sections, one is occupied by Buttevant GAA and the two others are occupied by local businesses. Literary history Buttevant also has many literary associations: Edmund Spenser, from his manor at Kilcolman, 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). Clotilde Augusta Inez