Field boundary, Glencarbury, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Glencarbury, Co. Sligo

On an exposed rocky hillock in the mountain pasture of Glencarbury, County Sligo, a small cluster of ruined walls sits in a landscape that cartographers from two separate centuries simply chose to ignore.

Neither the 1837 nor the 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this complex, which means it slipped through the documentary record entirely, leaving only the stones themselves to mark that people once worked and sheltered here.

The remains form a modest but coherent picture. A roughly rectangular field, about sixteen metres north to south and fourteen metres east to west, is outlined by the low footings of drystone walls, though the eastern wall has vanished entirely. Tucked into the north-east and north-west corners of this enclosure are at least two booley huts, small seasonal shelters associated with the practice of booleying, whereby farming communities would move their cattle to upland grazing during summer months, living temporarily in these rough structures while the animals grazed the higher pastures. A third building also survives nearby. The whole complex almost certainly dates to after 1700, placing it within the world of post-medieval rural life in Connacht, a period often poorly represented in the physical record. What makes the setting particularly atmospheric is its position: views extend well in most directions, broken only to the west by rising ground, and the site sits roughly a hundred metres north of a now disused barytes mine, a reminder that this upland was once a working landscape in more than one sense. Barytes, a heavy mineral ore used historically in paint manufacture and later in oil drilling, was extracted commercially in several parts of Sligo and Mayo, and the proximity of the mine to these agricultural remains hints at a community making use of whatever the mountain had to offer.

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Pete F
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