Deserted Village at Slievemore

I was surprised to learn that there is a Deserted Village at the foot of Slievemore. It wasn’t that far from Dugort so I decided to drop by for a visit. There is this practice of “booleying”, which means that people would live in different places in summer and winter. In the case of this village in Slievemore, people would come here in the summer to let their cows graze on the grass of the mountain. They would then return to their own villages for the winter. Curiously, they don’t really live that far away. Perhaps the grass was greener here. Then again, this part of the island is far from the sea, people probably prefer to live near the water.

Achill is one of the last places where booleying was practiced and this village was one of them. There are the ruins of a hundred houses in various states of disrepair. This is actually a rich archeological site since the village appears to have been built on top of another much older village. The houses are all made of stone and have long since lost their roofs. In some ruins, you can still make out windows. I noticed that the houses are actually not that big. In fact, a lot of them are quite small. Maybe since they didn’t really plan on staying here that long, the villager never needed to build larger homes. The village has actually seen enough bad times, even before the time of booleying, the village suffered emigration because of the famine years. This contributed to the decline of the village until, it was only used for booleying, until the mid 20th century.

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