Booley hut, Oakwood, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Farm Buildings

Booley hut, Oakwood, Co. Wicklow

On a bracken-covered slope above the bog near Glenreemore Brook in upland Wicklow, a low rectangle of mossy stone walls sits almost invisibly in the landscape.

These are the remains of a booley hut, a temporary seasonal shelter used by farming communities who practised transhumance, the old custom of driving cattle to upland grazing pastures in summer and living among them until autumn. Booley huts were the most basic of structures, built quickly and without permanence in mind, which is precisely why so few have survived well enough to be identified at all.

In 1949, the historian and topographer Liam Price visited this area in the company of a local guide named Burke, who pointed out two rectangular stone foundations on the slope above the bog, close to the Glenreemore Brook. Price noted that they resembled a structure he knew elsewhere, referred to as a Boolia House, and were roughly the same size. The brook itself marks the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Knocknadroose, placing these ruins right at an old territorial edge, which would not have been unusual for booley ground, often situated on the margins between settled land and open hill pasture. The site lies approximately thirteen metres north and twenty-five metres east of the brook, and the walls, though reduced and smothered in bracken, retain enough of their rectangular outline to be read as a coherent structure.

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Pete F
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