On a heather-covered plateau in Curraghduff, the remains of a booley hut survive in a form that rewards close attention. Long and narrow, with internal dimensions of roughly 6.9 metres by 1.2 metres, it is barely wide enough to shelter a person lying across it. A drain runs through the centre of the structure and out through the entrance, which faces north on the western side. That entrance is just 0.75 metres wide, a gap suited to squeezing through rather than striding in.

Booley huts are the residue of a once-widespread Irish practice known as booleying, a form of transhumance in which farming communities moved their cattle to upland grazing grounds for the summer months. The herders, often young people, would follow the animals and live in these temporary shelters for the season. The word booley derives from the Irish "buaile", meaning a milking place or summer pasture. What makes the Curraghduff example structurally interesting is the way it was partly built over a natural rock outcrop on its western end, with the drain engineered to carry moisture away from the living surface. The hut is associated with a broader field system in the surrounding area, suggesting that this stretch of upland was once part of an organised seasonal landscape, not simply an ad hoc camp. The combination of built drainage and an adjacent field system points to a degree of practical planning that sits uneasily with any romantic notion of rough pastoral wandering.