This is a remarkable study in terms of its chronological sweep, its use of diverse sources and its multi-disciplinary approach to the past. It grapples with the elusive traces left in the Irish landscape by a form of pastoral farming known in the international literature as transhumance and in Ireland as booleying. The author employs archaeological field work, soil science, documentary evidence, place names analysis, oral history and cartography to trace the evolution of this set of farming practices and their eventual demise.
Transhumance is an intricate system of farming whereby livestock are moved in summertime from one farming environment, usually lowland farms, up on to the rough pastures found on the slopes of neighbouring hills or mountains. In wintertime the flocks of animals are returned from these commonages to the home farms. The kinds of livestock moved about might include sheep, goats, cows, bulls and bullocks. In this way farmers gained access to additional grazing and economised on land use at home. The distances travelled in these seasonal movements could vary but in Ireland they seem to have been well under twelve kilometres in most cases.
As Costello emphasises, booleying involved the movement of people as well as stock. Rough shelters were constructed on the hillsides to house the herders who typically were of adolescent age or children, the opportunity cost of whose labour presumably was low. The numbers of people involved were considerable. Three areas are studied intensively in this work: those of the Carna peninsula, Connemara, County Galway, the parish of Gleann Cholm Cille in south-west Donegal and the Galtee Mountains on the Tipperary–Limerick borderlands. In the first of these two study areas something like one-third of the people were dispatched to the hills to look after livestock. To an outsider to the field this seems surprisingly high, implying large movement and relocation of people, albeit on a temporary seasonal basis.
The origins of booleying lie in the medieval period and possibly much earlier. Nor was the practice confined to Gaelic areas. It existed in Old English territories as well. Costello explores the post-medieval period and is refreshingly frank about the speculative nature of much of what can be said before the nineteenth century in view of the paucity of documentation and the absence of more detailed archaeological work. Ironically, the sources become more plentiful when the practice is under pressure from population growth, commercialisation of agriculture (dairying and cattle raising in particular) and efforts at estate improvement. Some theoretical borrowings from the property rights paradigm in the economics literature might perhaps have sharpened some of the valuable insights developed by the author, particularly in relation to transitions over time.
Explosive pre-Famine population growth, it is argued, led to a much more crowded rural landscape and eventually reduced opportunities for transhumance. Integration into a wider world of market exchange initially made booleying more attractive, the incentives for commercial butter production being a prime example. But later, in conjunction with population growth, these forces served to restrict the practice. It is noteworthy that landlords by and large seem to have adopted a laissez faire attitude to the practice, though estate policy might indirectly constrict the operations of the system, as happened apparently in the vicinity of the Galtee Mountains.
What is particularly impressive about Costello's work is the agency ascribed to tenant farmers in shaping the landscape and adapting to market opportunities, population pressure and landlord incentives. Social life in the summertime on hills and mountainside is also given its due, though the extent of sociability and possible sexual liaisons between boys and girls, living away from home and exempt from close parental supervision, has to be reconstructed imaginatively.
By the mid- to late-nineteenth century transhumance in Ireland was practised only ‘by land-starved communities along the western seaboard’, the Galtee Mountains being something of an exception in that booleying survived in an environment of intensive commercial and dairy farming. But this was not the case generally in dairying districts in southern and eastern Ireland. This gives rise to a question about the relative importance of transhumance in Irish agricultural production during the last few centuries. Booleying is a visually arresting and dramatic example of practices that served both economic and social functions and that have long since disappeared, rather like the meitheal (co-operative work group) or the communal threshing. Costello helpfully relates Irish experience to Welsh, Scottish and Scandinavian parallels, and laments the neglect of the subject by historians and others. He goes on to show how these complex traditional practices connected with the global articulation of capitalist food markets. But in the Irish context in the last two or three centuries is it not the case that most livestock production took place independently of any dependence on upland grazing pastures? If so, are we speaking of a practice, that for all its fascination, was of fairly marginal economic importance?
