BOOLEY HUT (destroyed) in Coolnagoppoge

Booley huts scattered across Coolnagoppoge and elsewhere in County Antrim served transient workers, tenant farmers and travelling craftspeople throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were simple, seasonal and often abandoned without ceremony, which is why so many disappeared before modern recording began. The lost hut at Coolnagoppoge may have hosted a family for one summer, a labourer for one winter or a trader passing through with goods and stories. Its destruction removed little more than a footprint in the earth, yet that footprint belonged to someone who lived, worked and left behind no monument at all.