Feirmeoirí faoi Cheilt: Dui Chun Cinn agus Dúshláin sa Taighde faoi Ghnás an Bhuailteachais

This article revisits the seasonal farming practice of booleying (buailteachas) which died out in Ireland during the 19"' and early 20"' centuries. Booleying was a form of agro-pastoral farming which involved the seasonal movement of people and cattle to pastures in marginal land' where they generally stayed for the duration of the summer' if not slightly longer. It is a small-scale relative of transhumance practices that still take place in some parts of continental Europe. The article assesses the progress that has been made in understanding booleying in the seventy to eighty years since folklorists attempted to collect detailed information on the practice from elderly people' largely in the west of Ireland. It points out that it has not been studied in detail since that period by ethnographers' whose interest in booleying lay mainly in data collection and presentation. Inevitably' as the ethnographic sources dried up' so did scholarship in the discipline. Moreover' booleying systems in the east and south of Ireland have been ignored' since here memories of the practice were weaker or non-existent. The author uses examples from Munster to show that a combination of archaeological' historical and placename evidence can retrieve details about the operation of booleying. The usefulness of placenames is evaluated in particular since these are available even when other evidence of booleying has not survived. Ultimately' no one source is without challenges. As further archaeological work increases our knowledge of the material culture' a multi-disciplinary approach is necessary to bringing this somewhat elusive but integral aspect of Irish farming heritage to light and doing justice to the Irish Folklore Commission 's fieldwork.