On a heather-covered col near the north-eastern face of the Comeragh Mountains in County Waterford, the remains of a booley hut sit quietly among the upland stones. Booley huts were temporary shelters used during the practice of booleying, the seasonal movement of livestock to higher ground in summer months, a form of transhumance common across Ireland into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Families, often women and young people, would follow the cattle up to mountain pastures and live in these rough stone structures for the duration of the grazing season before descending again in autumn. The fact that this one still has a legible footprint at all is a small surprise.

What survives here is a rectangular stone wall-footing, roughly 0.8 metres wide, enclosing an interior space measuring approximately 7.4 metres north to south and between 1.7 and 2.3 metres east to west. That internal width, barely enough for a person to lie down comfortably across, gives a sense of just how spare these shelters were. The structure sits within a cairnfield, a grouping of stone cairns that may predate the hut by a considerable stretch, suggesting that this exposed shoulder of mountain has been used, marked, and returned to by people across several different eras. The cairns and the hut do not belong to the same moment in history, but they share the same indifferent ground.