Paul Henry - Account of the deserted village at Slievemore

It was high summer when I had reached Achill [in 1909], but so profitably and pleasurably had my time been spent that winter was on us before I realised how imperceptibly it had crept upon the land. One day of this, my first winter in Achill, I had wandered away towards a place called 'Crumphaun' and was going in the direction of Slievemore; I was going nowhere in particular, just wandering in search of anything that might turn up, and I found myself in a part of the island where I had never been before although it was but a short distance from my home. I could see Keel and its cottages, but a slight depression presently hid Keel from my sight. I walked on and came upon a strange village which struck me as having great possibilities for a drawing. There were no people or animals in sight, not even a cow or a sheep. I found that the rough track led to a little huddle of houses which seemed to be deserted. A little farther on I saw one or two more strange cottages but they also seemed uninhabited.

I wandered up and down the bohereen; I went to the houses one by one to find them all bolted and barred and still no sign of a human being. I visited every house with the same result; it was as if a plague had swept everybody away, although there were signs that the houses had been occupied comparatively recently. It was more deserted, more forlorn than any place I had ever seen. And then realisation came to me - I was in a 'Booley'. A 'Booley' is an old Irish name for a summer dwelling like the 'Saeter' in the Alps, where the people took their cattle in the summer months for a change of pasture. I was in Old Slievemore about a mile from Keel, but as I sat there I was centuries away in my mind. The silence was profound. I could hear far away the muffled boom of the sea thundering on the rocks of Gubelennaun, no other sound, except perhaps my quick breathing because I was excited and entranced with this glimpse into a world hundreds of years old. It was strange, and apart from its loneliness, bizarre; it was troglodyte in its uncouthness, but it had an intimacy, a friendliness, a familiarity, it was the ancestral home of the tribe.

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