Booley hut, Cregganroe, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Cregganroe, Co. Mayo

On a narrow terrace cut into the lower slope of a rocky ridge in County Mayo, a rough circle of stones sits so low in the ground that it barely interrupts the upland pasture around it.

Sod has crept over most of the wall, leaving only a broken ring of large and medium-sized stones visible, the whole thing enclosing an interior space of roughly three metres across. Without knowing what to look for, you could walk straight past it.

This is a booley hut, one of a cluster associated with a field system at Cregganroe. Booley huts were seasonal shelters used during the practice of transhumance, or booleying, in which farming communities moved their cattle to higher ground in summer, following the grazing, and temporarily lived alongside them. The hut here sits on a north-facing slope, with the ridge rising sharply to the south and boggy ground stretching away to the north below. The drystone wall, built without mortar from locally gathered stone, survives to a height of only around twenty centimetres and a width of roughly sixty to seventy centimetres; it is, in its present condition, more trace than structure. There are two gaps in the wall, one to the east and one to the west, and either or both may originally have served as an entrance. The fact that it sits within a wider cluster of similar huts, each linked to traces of an old field system nearby, suggests this was not an isolated shelter but part of an organised seasonal landscape, a temporary community occupying the uplands for the grazing months before retreating again.

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Pete F
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