Mark O Donahue

For 300 years the English government in Ireland tried to make it illegal for an Irish family to spend the summer with its cows. The practice was called booleying. Every May the household left the winter village and walked the herd up into the hills, to a cluster of huts on the summer pasture, and lived there until October. Grandparents, children, the lot. The men came and went. The women ran the booley, and the booley ran on milk: fresh, soured, curdled, buttered, and eaten as the day's meals. The grass was free because it was up a mountain, and a family that owned 8 cows and a mountain wanted for nothing until the frost. The English could not stand it. A people that walked away every summer could not be counted, tithed or made to plough. The Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, forbade the Irish to booley their cattle on any land held by the English, and licensed the English to seize the herd if they did. By 1612 the King's attorney general in Dublin could report that it had been made penal for an Englishman even to allow it. Edmund Spenser, who had been handed 3,000 acres of confiscated Cork, wrote a whole pamphlet on what was wrong with Ireland, and this was near the top of it. Living out with the herd, he said, taught the Irish to be wild and to feed themselves without a master. That was the objection, in his own words. Booleying was outlawed because it worked. The remedy, over the next century, was to take the hills, fence the grass, put the family on a rented acre in the valley, and hand it a potato. The last booleys in Ireland were still walked up the hills of Achill in the 1940s, by people who had been told for 600 years that their summers were a crime.