Post-medieval upland settlement and the decline of transhumance: a case-study from the Galtee Mountains, Ireland

This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval period, c. 1600-1900 a.d., and attempts to explain the reasons for its decline. The results of field survey into seasonal upland structures (or booley houses) occupied during this time are discussed while considering the difficulties involved in their identification and dating. In the parish of Kilbeheny, it is shown how a number of these booley houses were used in a nineteenth-century system of small-scale transhumance, contrasting this with what appears to have been a more important form of the practice in the mid-seventeenth century. The paper then goes on to demonstrate how population growth and the commercialisation of farming in the intervening period contributed to the marginalisation of transhumance in the regional farming economy. It is speculated that much of the extant archaeological evidence for seasonal settlement belongs to a post-1750, reduced, form of transhumance in which the produce of dairying was vital to the semisubsistence farming carried on by tenants on small and relatively new holdings in the foothills.