Booley hut, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

Eight huts in total are clustered around the northern and north-eastern edges of a small natural basin, through which a stream still flows, and they tend to occur in pairs, a detail unusual enough to suggest that the grouping was purposeful rather than accidental.

The huts are associated, by local tradition, with booleying, the practice by which farming families would move their cattle to upland grazing pastures for the summer months, living temporarily in simple shelters while the lower fields recovered. The word booley derives from the Irish buaile, a milking place or summer pasture. This particular hut sits at the extreme north-western end of the basin and is a modest structure: a roughly square hollow, measuring around 2.2 metres north to south and 2.4 metres east to west internally. Its northern and eastern edges are marked by low earthen scarps, while the western side retains a fragment of stone wall, just a tenth of a metre high, built with rectangular blocks laid with their long axes running east to west. A large stone anchors the north-western corner. The southern limit of the hollow is largely lost, though a single substantial stone survives in the south-eastern corner. Immediately to the west, faint traces of what was once a turf stack can still be made out, the turf itself long since robbed away for use elsewhere. A second hut of the same cluster lies just two metres to the south-south-east, continuing the pairing pattern seen across the site as a whole.