Booley hut, Addergoole, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Addergoole, Co. Galway

On the south-eastern slope of Diamond Hill in County Galway, half-swallowed by blanket bog, sits a small stone structure that once sheltered people who followed their cattle to summer pasture.

A booley hut, to use the Irish term, was a seasonal dwelling associated with the practice of booleying, whereby farming families would move livestock to upland grazing during the warmer months and live in rough temporary shelters while they were there. This one sits on a terrace within a sharp bend of the Sruffaunloughaunnavcagh, a small stream that feeds into the Polladirk River to the east, in a spot that feels genuinely remote even by Connemara standards.

The structure is subrectangular, with internal dimensions of roughly 3.6 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, and its walls are double-faced, meaning they were built with two parallel lines of stone and a rubble fill between, a technique that lends even modest walls a degree of solidity. The internal height at the north-east corner still reaches 0.7 metres, though the whole thing is heavily overgrown. A possible entrance gap survives on the west side. A low wall, about 2.6 metres long, extends from the north-west corner and runs westward, terminating at a small oval arrangement of boulders less than a metre across in either direction. Whether this ancillary feature served as a pen, a hearth enclosure, or something else is unclear. A further small structure lies approximately 30 metres to the south-west, suggesting this may have been a cluster of related seasonal buildings rather than a single isolated shelter.

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Pete F
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