Slievemore Deserted Village: The Last Booley Village

On the southern foothills of Slievemore on Achill Island, a line of ruined stone houses runs about a kilometre and a half east to west in three sections — Tuar, Tuar Riabhach and Faiche — with 137 houses recorded by the Ordnance Survey. The archaeology puts the settlement no earlier than about 1750, and it was lived in the year round under the rundale system, the summer booley pastures being elsewhere on the island at Annagh, Dirk, Keem Bay and Bunnowna. It was abandoned through the 1850s — hurried by the Famine but not caused by it alone, with poor harvests, thinning soil and rising rents behind it — and most of the families moved down to Dooagh on the coast. Then they kept coming back: their descendants drove cattle up here every summer and lived in the old houses until the 1940s, the last place in Ireland or Britain where booleying survived.