On the southern summit of Bleantasour Mountain in County Waterford, an oval patch of heather and grass marks something easy to walk past without a second thought. Look more carefully and the outline of a low stone wall-footing traces an enclosure roughly six and a half metres long and just under four metres wide, with a gap on the north-east side that once served as a doorway. This is a booley hut, the remnant of a seasonal shelter used during the old Irish practice of booleying, or transhumance, in which farming communities drove their cattle to upland pastures each summer and lived alongside them in temporary structures like this one.

Booleying was once widespread across Ireland, a practical response to the demands of the agricultural calendar. Families, often the younger members, would leave the lowland farms at the start of summer and spend months on the mountain, making use of grazing that would otherwise go untouched, before returning with the animals in autumn. The shelters they built were modest by design, constructed from whatever stone lay nearby, roofed with timber, turf, or heather, and intended to last a season rather than a lifetime. Over generations, repeated use of the same sites could leave behind exactly the kind of low, rounded footprint visible on Bleantasour, where the surviving wall-footing is only about half a metre wide. The gap of three and a half metres on the north-east side is wide enough to suggest a proper entrance rather than a later collapse, hinting at something that was once deliberate and functional.

The structure sits on the southern summit of the mountain, a position that would have offered reasonable shelter from prevailing weather while keeping the surrounding terrain in view. The stonework is now barely proud of the surrounding vegetation, and the oval shape is most legible when the heather is low or the light is raking across the hillside at an angle.