On a heather-covered plateau in Curraghduff, County Waterford, a low rectangle of stone wall-footings traces the outline of a structure that was never meant to be permanent. Measuring 8.5 metres by 3.3 metres, with an entrance in each of the two long walls, this is a booley hut, the kind of seasonal shelter used during the old Irish practice of booleying, or transhumance, in which farming communities moved their cattle to upland summer pastures and lived alongside them for months at a time. The double-entrance arrangement is typical of the type, allowing movement through the building rather than simply into it, practical for people spending a working summer at altitude rather than settling in for the long term.

The hut does not sit alone on the plateau. It is associated with a field system in the same area, the remnants of the enclosures and boundaries that would have organised the surrounding grazing land during those seasonal occupations. Together, the hut and the field system form a small, legible landscape of upland agriculture, the kind that was once common across Ireland but gradually fell out of use as farming practices changed and the seasonal migration to high ground became economically unnecessary. What survives at Curraghduff is the stone skeleton of that arrangement, the wall-footings too low now to shelter anyone, but clear enough in outline to suggest how the place once functioned.