Transhumance and the making of Ireland's uplands, 1550–1900. By Eugene Costello. Pp 240. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2020. £75 hardback.

This is a remarkable study in terms of its chronological sweep, its use of diverse sources and its multi-disciplinary approach to the past. It grapples with the elusive traces left in the Irish landscape by a form of pastoral farming known in the international literature as transhumance and in Ireland as booleying. The author employs archaeological field work, soil science, documentary evidence, place names analysis, oral history and cartography to trace the evolution of this set of farming practices and their eventual demise. Transhumance is an intricate system of farming whereby livestock are moved in summertime from one farming environment, usually lowland farms, up on to the rough pastures found on the slopes of neighbouring hills or mountains. In wintertime the flocks of animals are returned from these commonages to the home farms. The kinds of livestock moved about might include sheep, goats, cows, bulls and bullocks. In this way farmers gained access to additional grazing and economised on land use at home. The distances travelled in these seasonal movements could vary but in Ireland they seem to have been well under twelve kilometres in most cases. As Costello emphasises, booleying involved the movement of people as well as stock. Rough shelters were constructed on the hillsides to house the herders who typically were of adolescent age or children, the opportunity cost of whose labour presumably was low. The numbers of people involved were considerable. Three areas are studied intensively in this work: those of the Carna peninsula, Connemara, County Galway, the parish of Gleann Cholm Cille in south-west Donegal and the Galtee Mountains on the Tipperary– Limerick borderlands. In the first of these two study areas something like one-third of the people were dispatched to the hills to look after livestock. To an outsider to the field this seems surprisingly high, implying large movement and relocation of people, albeit on a temporary seasonal basis. The origins of booleying lie in the medieval period and possibly much earlier. Nor was the practice confined to Gaelic areas. It existed in Old English territories as well. Costello explores the post-medieval period and is refreshingly frank about the speculative nature of much of what can be said before the nineteenth century in view of the paucity of documentation and the absence of more detailed archaeological work. Ironically, the sources become more plentiful when the practice is under pressure from population growth, commercialisation of agriculture (dairying and cattle raising in particular) and efforts at estate improvement. Some theoretical borrowings from the property rights paradigm in the economics literature might perhaps have sharpened some of the valuable insights developed by the author, particularly in relation to transitions over time. Explosive pre-Famine population growth, it is argued, led to a much more crowded rural landscape and eventually reduced opportunities for transhumance. Integration into a wider world of market exchange initially made booleying more attractive, the incentives for commercial butter production being a prime example. But later, in conjunction with population growth, these forces served to restrict the practice. It is noteworthy that landlords by and large seem to have adopted a laissez faire attitude to the practice, though estate policy might indirectly constrict the operations of the system, as happened apparently in the vicinity of the Galtee Mountains. Irish Historical Studies (2021), 45 (168), 333–358. © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd