Booley hut, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Farm Buildings
On the lower western slopes of the Monavullagh Mountains in County Waterford, the stone foundations of a long-vanished hut sit in rough pasture beside the upper Araglin river valley. The structure is modest in its footprint, roughly ten metres long and three metres wide, but what it represents is a practice that shaped the upland landscapes of Ireland for centuries. This is a booley hut, a temporary seasonal shelter used during booleying, the Irish tradition of transhumance in which farming families or herders would drive cattle up to mountain pastures for the summer months, living in simple structures while the animals grazed the higher ground.
The valley here runs roughly northeast to southwest, and the site occupies the transitional zone where lower pasture gives way to the rougher terrain of the Monavullagh Mountains. That positioning is characteristic of booley settlements generally; they cluster at the margins, neither fully in the lowland farming world nor deep in the wilderness above. The rectangular plan of this particular structure, recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Waterford published in 1999, survives only as a foundation outline, the walls long since collapsed or robbed for other uses. It forms part of a wider national monument complex at Coumaraglinmountain, protected under a Preservation Order made in 1996, which suggests that the surrounding area preserves other traces of this seasonal upland life.