Booley hut, Cregganroe, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Cregganroe, Co. Mayo

On a north-facing slope in the uplands of Cregganroe, County Mayo, a scatter of low stones traces the outlines of what was once a seasonal shelter.

It is easy to walk past without a second glance, but the remains belong to a tradition of transhumance that shaped the Irish countryside for centuries. Booley huts were the temporary dwellings used by families who drove their cattle to upland pastures each summer, living alongside the animals while the lower fields recovered. This particular example sits on a narrow terrace of rough pasture on a rocky ridge, looking north over a spread of boggy ground, and it is just one of a cluster of at least ten such structures recorded in the area, associated with the remnants of a field system that once organised this seemingly featureless hillside.

The hut itself is modest, arguably the least substantial in the cluster. Its core is a subrectangular space of roughly three metres north to south and two metres east to west, defined on the east side by a shallow arc of collapsed wall, now only about thirty centimetres high and just under a metre wide. On the west, the boundary dissolves into a gapped line of stones, one of them a single large upright, with loose rubble spread around it. At its northern end, the wall merges into the south wall of a neighbouring booley hut, suggesting the two structures were used together or grew up in close relation to one another. Appended to the southeast is a small subcircular enclosure, its interior diameter somewhere between 1.6 and 1.7 metres, formed by a ring of low contiguous stones. What this additional space was for is genuinely unclear; it may have served as a small pen, a storage area, or simply an extra room attached to the main shelter next door. The site was brought to wider attention by the archaeologist Michael Gibbons.

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Pete F
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