Booley hut, Carrignamuck, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Carrignamuck, Co. Wicklow

On a south-south-west-facing slope in the rocky uplands of County Wicklow, a small cluster of drystone chambers quietly records a way of life that was once ordinary across Ireland's hills.

This is a booley hut, a type of seasonal shelter used during the practice of booleying, or transhumance, in which farming families moved their cattle to higher summer pastures and lived temporarily in rough stone structures while the animals grazed. The complex at Carrignamuck consists of three interconnected chambers, each built without mortar, with walls roughly a metre thick and standing to a maximum height of one and a half metres. Entrance gaps face west, and the largest chamber measures over four metres east to west internally. It is compact, functional architecture, designed for seasonal shelter rather than permanence.

An excavation carried out in 1979 recovered sherds of nineteenth and twentieth-century pottery from the site, along with fragments of iron. These finds suggest the huts were in use well into the modern period, which is not unusual; booleying persisted in parts of Ireland into the early twentieth century even as it had largely disappeared elsewhere. The three chambers are arranged in an informal cluster on the slope, with Chamber A being the largest, Chamber B to its south with an internal diameter of around two and a half metres, and a partial third chamber to the north of A. The dimensions are modest by any measure, and the drystone construction, rubble walling laid without lime or cement, would have offered little insulation beyond a windbreak and a dry floor.

The site has not fared well since it was first formally recorded. The surrounding land was planted with forestry after 1990, and a later inspection in 2012 found the structure partially destroyed as a result. The eastern side of the larger chamber remained more or less intact at that point, along with a portion of the south-west corner and some associated walling a short distance to the south-south-east. What survives is fragmentary, embedded now in planted ground rather than the open hillside where it once made sense as a place to spend a summer with cattle and little else.

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