Booley hut, Tormore, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Tormore, Co. Sligo

A small rectangle of stones in the mountain pasture above Tormore, County Sligo, went unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey when its surveyors mapped the area in 1837, and was still absent from their maps when they returned in 1913.

Whatever life was conducted here, it left no mark on the official cartographic record, only on the ground itself, where the collapsed wall footings survive to a height of no more than forty centimetres.

What remains is the outline of a booley hut, a type of temporary seasonal shelter associated with the old Irish practice of transhumance, in which farming families and their herds moved to upland grazing in summer. The word "booley" derives from the Irish "buaile", meaning a milking place or summer pasture. This particular structure measures six metres north to south and four metres east to west, its walls reduced to rubble footings roughly eighty centimetres thick. No break in the perimeter has been clearly identified, so the position of the original doorway remains uncertain. The site sits on a gently undulating, rocky slope facing south-south-west, with open views to the east, south, and west, though higher ground closes off the horizon in other directions. On the basis of its form and construction, the hut is thought to date to after 1700.

The absence of any doorway trace, combined with the low survival of the walls, means there is little to read from the structure at ground level beyond its bare dimensions and orientation. Even so, the location itself does a good deal of the explaining. The south-west-facing slope, the wide outlook across the lower ground, and the rocky mountain pasture surrounding it all fit the pattern of upland booley settlements that were once a familiar feature of the Irish rural calendar, before such practices faded from common use.

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Pete F
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