19. BF Booleying

Speaker: John Ward

Lest we think that only the young lads had it tough after the 1st of May with the Hiring Fairs, there is a summertime activity reserved for the young girls that certainly was no picnic. Transhumance may sound like a phenomenon from a sci-fi film, but it's the more prosaic activity of humans bringing the cattle to mountain pastures. 

Known in Ireland as 'booleying', it was largely the preserve of young women. Coming from the Irish word 'buaile', it referred to any kind of cattle enclosure and can be traced back to the fourth century BC in Greece no less. It is still practised in parts of Scandinavia and Iceland, but its heyday in Ireland has long since gone.

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