Booley hut, Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

On the southern slopes of the Ox Mountains in County Sligo, a small ruined hut sits on a low river terrace beside a tributary of the Owenboy River, its walls so thoroughly reclaimed by sod and moss that it reads more as a feature of the hillside than a human construction.

It is a booley hut, a category of seasonal shelter associated with the old Irish practice of booleying, or transhumance, in which farming communities moved their cattle to upland grazing grounds for the summer months and lived alongside them in temporary structures. The practice was once widespread across Ireland, but the physical remains are rarely as legible as this one.

The hut is rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 4.8 metres north to south and 3 metres east to west, with walls approximately 1.2 metres thick and still standing to somewhere between 0.6 and 0.8 metres in height. They appear to be of dry-stone construction, built without mortar using local gneiss, the coarse, banded metamorphic rock that forms much of the Ox Mountains geology. A doorway 0.8 metres wide survives at the northern end of the east wall. Appended to the south wall is a small open-sided annex, its interior measuring roughly 1.1 metres east to west, which may have served as a pen or storage area. A short distance to the south-west, two loose heaps of field stones suggest material that was either cleared from the terrace or left over from construction. More purposeful is the low stone wall running along the stream bank to the south, which appears to have been built specifically to channel overflow and protect the terrace from flooding, a practical intervention that points to long and considered use of the site. A second structure lies approximately 60 metres to the north-east, suggesting this was not an isolated shelter but part of a small cluster of seasonal occupation.

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