Booley hut, Crumlin, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Farm Buildings
On the north-western slopes of Knockaunmountain in County Clare, somewhere between the 600 and 700 foot contours, a small stone hut sits on a level terrace as if it has simply always been there.
It is barely large enough to crouch inside, its interior measuring roughly 1.55 metres north to south and 1.5 metres east to west, with walls standing just over a metre high internally. A single flat slab closes the top, and a low doorway, only a metre tall and splaying outward from an interior width of 44 centimetres to an exterior width of 70 centimetres, opens to the north-north-east. The whole thing is drystone, built without mortar, with corbelled walling between half a metre and 0.7 metres thick, the stones angled inward in overlapping courses to carry the roof.
This is a booley hut, a category of seasonal shelter associated with the Irish practice of booleying, or buailteachas, in which farming families and their herds moved to upland summer pastures for several months of the year, sometimes from May to October. The huts they left behind are rarely grand; functional and small, they were built to last a season or a few, not centuries. That this one has survived at all, on an exposed mountain terrace in the Clare uplands, says something about the durability of careful drystone construction. A second possible booley hut stands within a small enclosure roughly 12 metres to the north-east, suggesting this was not a solitary outpost but part of a small cluster of seasonal activity on the mountain.