MOBILE PASTORALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Mobility in past societies can be approached in many different ways. The word itself may refer to the physical movement or migration of groups of people, the vertical or horizontal movement of individuals within society, the trade and exchange of their objects or the diffusion of different technologies and ways of seeing the world between regions (e.g. Beaudry et al. 2013). Where the archaeology of farming societies is concerned, regular movement across the landscape by humans and their domesticated animals has gained increasing amounts of attention in recent decades. Pastoral movements tend to be more structured and repetitive than other forms of physical human mobility (e.g. refuge, colonisation, invasion) because the herding of livestock always revolves around the availability of pasture. This introduces certain limitations on how far pastoralists may travel and when. For socio-political reasons they may not have access to certain tracts of grassland, while climate and topography may render other areas undesirable. Having said that, seasonal variations in climate and vegetation are often what encourage pastoralists to move out of one region for part of the year, in order to take advantage of better pasture in one or more areas elsewhere. Indeed, for husbandmen and women in some parts of the world these variations can be so extreme as to make movement an absolute necessity. For example, it was and is common for people and their livestock to follow rainfall in the Central Andes (Browman 1997, 24–26), the Libyan Desert (Roe 2008, 494) and the arid Egypt/ Sudan border area (Wendrich 2008, 534).

Ethnographers, anthropologists and geographers have carried out many studies of mobile pastoralists in present-day contexts, as living societies worth studying in their own right (Barth 1961; Johnson 1969; Ingold 1980; Galaty and Johnson 1990; Chang and Koster 1994; Khazanov 1994; Salzmann 2004). It is naturally more difficult to gather information on past mobility by pastoralists not simply because direct observations are now impossible but also owing to the difficulty of tracing regular movement across past landscapes. With some justification, Vere Gordon Childe has been lambasted for pronouncing over eighty years ago that ‘pastoralists are not likely to leave many vestiges by which the archaeologist could recognize their presence’ (Childe 1936, 81; see Cribb 1991, 65).

This chapter discusses the evolving nature of seasonal movement and settlement in the three study areas in the context of major social, demographic and economic trends that set in from the seventeenth century. It examines the role of elites, first of all, and demonstrates how their level of concern with the management of upland pastures and cattle not only changed over time but varied across Ireland. In doing so, it provides a timely regional characterisation of the socio-political power structures in which subaltern peasant farmers practised transhumance over the course of the post-medieval period. With that in mind, it is possible to explore their adaptive capacity as population and land-use pressures became more noticeable in the Irish landscape. The (re)organisation or cessation of seasonal movements and the encroachment of farmers on upland commons all provide subtle indicators of interaction with these trends, and above all how people dealt with and contributed to them at a local landscape level.

Yet transhumance in this period does not simply echo wider historical processes. It also contains a hidden history of non-elite rural society. Thus the chapter examines the pragmatic approach to dwelling shown by herders as they made a seasonal home out of the hills, considering environmental as well as chronological factors in the morphology of booley sites and comparing their layout with that of contemporary permanent settlements. Furthermore, it highlights the role of transhumance in reproducing the socio-cultural structure of rural communities from generation to generation, particularly through delegation of upland herding tasks to young girls and women. The gender- and age-specific nature of participation in seasonal removals by the nineteenth century was, however, partly related to changes in market demand that tenant farmers became cognisant of. I therefore examine how the currents of capitalism changed livestock farming in uplands – in some cases conflicting with the idea of transhumance, in others encouraging it. The chapter's last section reveals how the disruption of customary grazing rights and elite-induced reorganisation of estates contributed to the final decline of seasonal movement.

THE ROLE OF THE ELITE IN CHANGING RURAL SOCIAL STRUCTURES

The Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman elites exerted significant influence over how transhumance operated before the mid-seventeenth century.

The first case study centres on the Carna peninsula of south Connemara in County Galway (Figure 3.1). The peninsula forms the majority of the civil parish of Moyrus (Maíros) in the barony of Ballynahinch. Known in Irish – the main language here – as Iorras Aithneach (‘The Stormy Peninsula’), it is located in what is very much a western coastal environment. The peninsula extends approximately 14km out from the mainland in a south-western direction and is 12km across at its widest. The only terrain that exceeds 150m a.s.l. is the ridge of Cnoc Mordáin, running close by its eastern coast (highest point 354m). Hence the vertical element of transhumance in this first study area is not very pronounced, the practice in many instances involving a primarily horizontal movement to rough pastures located on various knolls and low hills in the interior. Human population today is concentrated entirely along the coast and islands, and especially at the peninsula's south-western end, east and west of the small village of Carna. Together with Cill Chiaráin in the south-east, this forms the only services centre for the local population. The interior of the peninsula, although no longer inhabited seasonally by dairy-cow herders, continues to form a minor source of income for some in the community. Farms around the coast still use it as extensive year-round grazing for small numbers of dry Aberdeen Angus and Red Shorthorn cattle, along with some mountain sheep and horses. Machine cutting of peat for household fuel also takes place on a small scale. In addition, some sections of land have been afforested with conifers in the twentieth century, particularly to the south and west of Cnoc Mordáin, though these plantations have not all thrived.

The flatter areas and sinks of the peninsula's interior are occupied by blanket bog and scattered lakes. These tracts of wet bog are unlikely to have been suitable for cattle grazing in the recent past because of the risk of heavier animals getting stuck, though younger cattle – and perhaps sheep too – may have browsed these areas. The highest ridges of Cnoc Mordáin are also unlikely to have been used as rough pasture for cattle because of relatively severe wind exposure and a steep drop along much of Cnoc Mordáin's eastern side.

BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION

Transhumance is a form of seasonal pastoralism that has been practised around the world for many thousands of years. In basic terms, it is the seasonal movement of people and livestock from one environmental context to another, with the home settlement and main zone of crop production usually found in fertile lowlands or valleys and the summer pastures, such as heaths, wetlands, forests, hills and mountains, located over a wider area in a marginal zone of production. The people who move with the livestock occupy small dwellings in these marginal zones until they all return home for the winter half of the year or longer. As with all definitions of farming systems, however, this statement fails to acknowledge a lot of diversity. Every farming practice is a social practice, influenced by the needs and capabilities of different people and their interactions with one another. Every farming practice is also shaped by the environment, no two farmers having to deal with exactly the same soil fertility, topography or climate. Transhumance is an especially complex farming and social phenomenon in which people exploit, via movement, the seasonality of different environments. If communities are organised to cope with the absence of many of their members and most of their livestock for up to half the year, it becomes possible for them to spare more land for tillage crops and winter fodder, the latter, in turn, allowing them to maximise the size of herd that can be sustained through the winter.

Transhumance was practised in many parts of Ireland up to the nineteenth century and as late as the early twentieth century in the western regions of Connemara and Achill Island. Thus, the question of seasonal pastoral movement and settlement in Ireland is one for students of the past. In the Anglophone scholarship Irish transhumance is often known as ‘booleying’, a term derived from the practice of removing with dairy cattle to summer ‘booley’ settlements in rough hill pastures. However convenient the term may be for an Irish context, its application across the island masks a great deal of regional and local nuance over time. For one thing, ‘booley’ stems from the Irish-language word buaile, which has more than one meaning.

This book's second case study centres on the civil and Roman Catholic parish of Gleann Cholm Cille in south-west Donegal (Figure 4.1). It lies at the end of the Slieve League (Sliabh Liag) peninsula – Sliabh Liag being the highest point in the parish and peninsula at 595m a.s.l. Gleann Cholm Cille forms part of the Donegal Gaeltacht and its name translates into English as ‘The Valley of Colmcille’, Colmcille being a sixth-century Irish saint with whom an early medieval ecclesiastical site in the parish is associated. Like the rest of the peninsula, the landscape of Gleann Cholm Cille is essentially hilly. Three valleys running eastwards from the Atlantic coast cut the parish into approximately four upland blocs of varying extent, but all being 200m or greater in altitude. On the east the parish is bounded by the Abhainn Ghlinne (or ‘Glen River’), which has its source in the north and its mouth at Teileann Bay in the south. At its maximum it measures 12km from east to west and 18km from north to south, and covers an area of approximately 132km2.

There are two main types of bedrock in the area – psammitic and pelitic schist, marble, amphibolite and diamictite in most of the centre and along Abhainn Ghlinne, and quartzite on higher ground in the north and parts of the south. Blanket peat dominates the subsoil and soil layers of most of the parish, especially on the higher upland blocs. However, significant quantities of peaty podzols can be found on the lower slopes, along with acid brown earths and surface water gleys in the valleys, all of which have substantially greater agricultural potential than peat (GSI Datasets Public Viewer). Blackface mountain sheep predominate in the uplands, with small numbers of dry cattle found on improved farms in the valleys. Tree cover is very sparse today in the area, occurring only occasionally along field boundaries and roads. In some remote upland townlands, however, woodland scrub is beginning to regenerate as farming enters a stage of abandonment. Modern settlement is found in four main locations: Gleann village in the central valley of the parish (where most services are located), Málainn Mhór south of that, Málainn Bhig in the extreme south-west, and along Abhainn Ghlinne from the village of An Charraig northwards to Mín an Chearrbhaigh.

In spite of disparaging and vague remarks on Irish pastoralism by English commentators in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there is now good reason to believe that, throughout the post-medieval period, transhumance was a stable, wellorganised form of cattle farming. It was not long-distance or unpredictable; rather, it took place over distances that rarely exceeded 12km (frequently less in the nineteenth century) and with reference to set units of land – such as between smaller internal units within a parish, from one parish to an adjoining area of commonage outside the parish, or from several parishes to one large shared commonage. That seasonal movements of livestock are always grounded in political, economic and environmental realities is implicit in the distribution of transhumant systems in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: even then, farmers in the most productive expanses of lowland do not seem to have practised transhumance at all, their landscape being too densely settled and rough pasture occurring in patches that were too small and disparate for seasonal settlement to be a necessity.

THE VISIBILITY OF TRANSHUMANCE IN UPLAND LANDSCAPES

Where seasonal pastoral movements were necessary they are most clearly attested in today's cultural landscape by the remains of small houses and huts that both published and unpublished oral history indicate were occupied in summertime by herders who tended to and milked dairy cows. Many of these structures were in use up to the nineteenth century, and later still on rough pastures in the Carna peninsula and Achill Island. While they had a number of regional names, this book has chosen to refer to individual summer dwellings as either ‘booley’ houses or ‘booley’ huts (depending on their size), which stems from the Irish-language word buaile, meaning a milking place in summer pasture, or simply summer pasture.

The archaeological remains of booley dwellings are generally found on unenclosed and unimproved rough pasture between an altitude of 50m and 550m a.s.l., depending on the regional topography – the Carna peninsula containing examples of the former and the Galtee Mountains having examples approaching the latter elevation. All of them are located within a few hundred metres of a water source.

The Galtee Mountains (Irish: Na Gaibhlte) are located in the south-western province of Munster and feature a long central spine of mountain peaks – the highest of which, Galtymore, reaches 919m a.s.l, making it the highest in the country outside County Kerry. As such, this is the only case study in the book that deals with seasonal settlement in a mountain environment, albeit not in an Alpine sense. The entire range stretches approximately 23km from east to west and 10.4km north to south at its maximum. Along its northern flank is the Glen of Aherlow, while along the south is a wider plain, hemmed in on the south by the Knockmealdown Mountains. The Galtees are drained by valleys that meander away from the central spine towards these northern and southern lowlands (Figure 5.1).

Soil cover on the lower slopes consists of peaty podzols, with blanket peat occupying the higher plateaus and peaks (Gardiner and Radford 1980). Most of the Galtees’ vegetation consists of either grass- and sedge-dominated pasture or heather moorland. The livestock roaming this ground today are predominantly Blackface mountain sheep, who have a year-round presence. Some cattle – suckler cows, bullocks and heifers – also occasionally graze on the unenclosed commonage, but for the most part bovines are now limited to the improved pastures of privately owned farms in the foothills. Substantial parts of the lower slopes in the east and north of the Galtees have recently been afforested with non-native conifers for commercial purposes, along with valleys in the south, such as those containing the Attychraan and Burncourt Rivers. This land-use change has probably destroyed many archaeological features, some of which probably related to pastoralism. Generally speaking, however, the Galtee Mountains have experienced the ravages of coniferous planting to a lesser extent than Ireland's other inland uplands.

The nature of the soils varies considerably in the surrounding lowlands: the east and north-east is mainly covered by minimal grey brown podzolics with the rest falling under the categories of brown podzolics and gleys (Gardiner and Radford 1980). Most of this land is currently utilised intensively as enclosed cow pasture, with some tillage farming present in the more free-draining soils of the east and south-east.

This book is a product of my curiosity about farming practices and peoples – in the past, present and future. Growing up on an organic suckler cow farm in south County Limerick, Ireland, I have long been aware of the importance of food production and how it happens on a daily basis. Over the years, I have also grown to know the land and what it supports in terms of vegetation – the life blood of all animal husbandry. With some observation, it becomes clear that farming landscapes in Ireland and other parts of the world are the product of human action over generations, some buildings being constructed in living memory, subtle earthen features melting gradually back into the ground, others lying under the surface, others gone forever. It was these observations on the physical legacy of farming practices in the landscape that got me interested in archaeology. At least where I grew up, you simply could not understand how past humans interacted with and inhabited the landscape without going out and actually looking at it. And, with my experience of livestock, it was only natural that the study of pastoralism would attract me most.

Of course, in Ireland and much of Europe today, livestock rearing is a fairly sedentary practice. Farmers do not move with their animals as some pastoralists in Central Asia, the Near East and Sub-Saharan Africa do to this day. Typically, they stay put on a farm that has fixed boundaries, with cattle either moving between narrow fenced strips on a rotational basis or grazed on larger blocks of land containing several ditched or hedged fields. Depending on the number of cattle, another few fields would be closed off as meadows and cut as hay or, more commonly, silage during summer and early autumn (twice or even three times in a year of good growth). Once baled, this grass acts as winter fodder for the cattle after they are brought into sheds for the wettest and coldest months of the year. This is the ‘system’ of pastoralism that I grew up in and took for granted.

So, for that reason, it came as a great surprise in my undergraduate days at University College Cork to discover that Irish farming might once have involved more mobility.

PASTORAL MOBILITY IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN IRELAND: PERCEPTION VERSUS PRACTICE

There are indications of transhumant movements taking place from the early medieval period onwards in Ireland, though historical references to that effect are few in number and sparing in detail. Two glosses (annotations) on a seventh-/eighth-century Old Irish law tract explain that it was customary to go ‘out about May Day from the green of the old senlis [winter residence] to a summer pasture’ and, about November Day, to return from the grassland to the old residence (Neilson Hancock 1865, 132). It is difficult to tell how common such practices were and what social underpinnings they had, though a more detailed later text hints that relatively long journeys could be undertaken by pastoralists.

A farmer of 100 cows named Dima is said in an eleventh-century Life of Saint Cóemgen to have brought his animals and children on a grazing circuit (ar cuairt bhuailteachuis) to the Glendalough area of the Wicklow Mountains, where the cows were grazed in woodland and milked by herdsmen (Plummer 1922: 153–4). With his cows lactating, it seems likely that Dima's grazing circuit took place over the summer, so as to take advantage of the seasonal pastures available in Wicklow's uplands. Dima and his 100 cows were probably not alone in undertaking this journey: an Old Irish law text cited by Kelly (1997, 44) refers to cattle grazing freely on mountain land as a general entitlement. Given that Dima is said to have come all the way from Mide, a kingdom some 40km north-west of Glendalough at its closest (and over 100km away at its farthest), the benefits of this free summer grazing must have been worth the risk for strong farmers with dairy cows.

For its unusual richness, and because it is the first documentary instance of the word buailteachas – now the standard term in Irish for booleying (Ó Dónaill 1977, 153) – the story of Dima stands out as the most significant historical evidence of transhumance in medieval Ireland. When other snippets of information are taken into consideration (O’Rahilly 1946, 24; Lucas 1989, 58–67), it becomes clear that summer grazing on land outside core settlements was important from at least the late first millennium AD in Ireland.