Burren Country Read online

  Having made good your escape, you arrive in Ballyvaughan after a long day’s drive. You are now well and truly ensconced in ‘The West’. In the length of time it has taken to get here, you could have flown across the Atlantic and be walking the streets of mid-town Manhattan. For the return visitor there is a certainty of welcome with the familiar flowers, roads and fields, the reassuring rocks and boulders, or perhaps a favourite patch of limestone to be revisited. It is like calling on old friends you have not seen for a while.

  Standing at the northern apex, Ballyvaughan is a relaxing and contented place, and, for a village of just 250 people, the epicentre of so much. It is now time to unwind and acclimatise to the pace of the Burren. Discard your watch and mobile phone, tune in to the tranquillity of slowness, and indulge yourself in its empty nature.

  You are by no means the first to discover it. Many have walked here before. A long sequence of eminent writers and naturalists has drawn scores of parallels with this exotic cultural landscape in which you find yourself. It has been likened to the Steppes of Russia and to the Gobi and Arabian Deserts. Augustus John called it ‘an immobilised rough sea’. Thackeray, on his tour of Ireland in 1842, said it was ‘desolate’. Mícheál Mac Liammoír described it as ‘eerie and uneventful’.

  Ireland’s most famous literary botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger, who tramped these hills and fields during a long life, wrote in The Way That I Went, ‘The strangeness of this grey limestone country must be seen to be realised; it is like nothing else in Ireland or in Britain.’ The writer and cartographer Tim Robinson characterises it as ‘a hundred and fifty square miles of paradoxes’. Comparisons have been drawn with a wilderness and with our nearest neighbour in space – the lunar landscape of the moon. But that scrupulously observant chronicler of this patch of ground Sarah Poyntz says ‘the equation of the Burren to a moon-like surface is false, a spur-of-the-moment reaction to a strange and very beautiful landscape’.

  Exuberant newspaper and magazine travel articles and coffee table books with decadently rich photographs label their pieces ‘Walking on the Moon’ or ‘A Rock and a Hard Place’. An enormous variety of predictable descriptions have been offered up, creating a specific typecast vocabulary of set phrases. The adjectival barrel has been scraped and rescraped. Take your pick from the following: near-wasteland, desert, untamed land, wilderness, remote land. ‘Desert’ and ‘wilderness’ are the two most overused and stereotypical words about the Burren. A check on their meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the following:

  Desert: a dry, barren, often sand-covered area of land, characteristically desolate, waterless, and without vegetation.

  Wilderness: an uncultivated and uninhabited region.

  So does our Burren fit this description and answer to these characteristics? In the latter case, it is both cultivated and inhabited (about 1,700 people live within the Barony of the Burren). Because there are farms, outbuildings, animals, and electricity poles, the term wilderness can be ruled out. Desert may come nearer it but (apart from a couple of beaches) it is not sand-covered, the climate (aside from the wind) is rarely scorching or unforgiving and it has water, rainfall and vegetation aplenty, so dry can be ruled out.

  That leaves barren and desolate. To narrow down my search for le mot juste I flicked through the dictionary pages to these words:

  Desolate: solitary, ruined, neglected, barren, dreary, empty, forlorn, wretched, miserable.

  Barren: unable to bear young, devoid of vegetation or other signs of life, meagre, unprofitable, dull, unstimulating.

  Often dismissed as an inhospitable barren desert and an area of desolation, the Burren, as we shall see, is anything but barren (although there are electronic spell check connections since my computer does not recognise ‘Burren’ and suggests ‘barren’ as an alternative).

  The Burren always takes the definitive article before its name – it is never Burren. It conjures up remoteness. There is a suggestion of rocks, and emptiness in the two syllables. It has a strange and compelling power, an out-of-the-ordinariness and a mystique attached to it. In a similar way that the American writer Edward Abbey says the appeal of the Pinacate region in the northern Arizona desert ‘lies in its total lack of obvious appeal’, so too the Burren exudes that same lack of apparent appeal.

  Looking at the map, there is a compact feel to it. Its physical limits are squeezed in between Galway Bay to the north, the Atlantic on the west, and to the south and east it roughly follows a line drawn from Doolin, through Kilfenora, Corofin, west of Gort and south of Kinvara. Curiously, its limits at the northern and southern ends are set by two small hills, both appropriately called An Boirnín, ‘the little rock’. One is in the middle of the Flaggy Shore at 255m high; if you follow with your finger on the map an (almost) straight line south from this point you come to another An Boirnin, east of Kilnaboy, this one measuring 247m.

  For a couple of weeks on my visits, I generally set up temporary home in a cottage in the townland of Berneens in the heart of the limestone hills. It is idyllic, the sort of place many dream about. The cottage is a simple affair. Formidably lonely and suitably desolate (a mirror of the Burren itself), it is a place of utter isolation that unquestionably meets the dictionary definition of those words. On my first visit I drove past it without noticing it was there. It is not exactly hidden from view but is near a bend and set back from the main road, so you cannot hear any traffic and few living sounds.

  From its front door, no other houses are within eyesight. It therefore passes Edward Abbey’s peeing test: you can do it outside and no one will see you. The decibel levels are extremely low. The ambient nocturnal sound levels are amongst the lowest anywhere in Europe, on a par with sleeping in Venice where the peacefulness is bewitching because of the absence of traffic. I have stayed in this cottage for many years, observing ‘Ortstreue’, a term familiar to ornithologists when referring to migrating birds who return to the same location each year and more commonly known as ‘place faithfulness’.

  Late at night, from the back door, a pale yellow moon is often visible. Gently curving hills surround me on all sides, but no mountain peaks or high summits block distant views. The biggest, overlooking Black Head, is Dobhach Bhrainin at 318m. Foreign-seeming and strange, the hills look like a pile of saucers. Although the cottage is my personal short-term home, the 388 square kilometres making up the Barony of the Burren is my grander home. I attune myself to the silence and the absence of noise pollution such as burglar alarms, sirens and mobile phones. On arrival, with boyish enthusiasm, I work out itineraries, spreading the Folding Landscapes map on the kitchen table and fingering it fondly. With a pencil I circle several place names. I like their lyrical sound, find stimulus in the fact that they flex my imagination, and enjoy their taste on my tongue. Whispering aloud the hard consonants brings alive a palimpsest of names: Faunarooska, Ballykinvarga, Cahermachnaghten, Tobereenatemple, Drumbrickaun and Oughtdarra. The plosive, juddering syllables make me think of boulders, granite and rock banging together; townlands and small territories united by history, walls, rocks and hills. The name Burren, An Boireann, means ‘a big rock’. The poetry of the townlands is evident and I cannot get the names out of my head or work out their correct pronunciation.

  On my first morning I wake to a torrent of birdsong. Out-singing all others is a Clare cuckoo rousing me at dawn. For a moment I am suspicious that I have strayed into another world. It is a curiously alien landscape; limestone hills that seem bare, some with jagged points and filled with boulders and walls. The distant cuckoo comes closer. In my back garden it greets me with its call, an acclamation of arrival. It is a transcendental spring morning. Apart from the birdsong, it is a pin-drop silence with a sense of space and light all around me. I feel lucky: wild flowers, limestone hills, friendly bird life, an open blue sky, and sunlight twinkling on the sea.

  When the nature writer Mark Cocker moved to the Yare Valley in Norfolk to study crows, he said living there required a ‘major
aesthetic recalibration to appreciate it’. The Burren is a landscape hued of stone: stone monuments, stone cottages, stone fields, gigantic stone boulders, stone pavement, rocks and endless kilometres of walls. Everything my eye takes in is made of stone, a chaotic mix. It feels like being ejected into another world; it feels, as Praeger noted a hundred years ago, ‘like nothing else’. My own recalibration has begun.

  Walls and Hills at Keelhilla Nature Reserve © Marty Johnston

  2

  They all have Outrageous Names

  Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all … embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not – at least there’s something else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.

  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

  Armed with telescopes and microscopes, tape measures and cameras, large parties on field trips come from schools and colleges to study the ground. Earnest students of limestone stroll around with laminated maps hanging upside down from lanyards around their necks. They are studying the pavement patterns and looking at the development of the surfaces. Specifically, they are interested in gryke density and clint width, and, with intense concentration, are working out the main gryke directions. They are also considering the variation of gryke frequency from one place to another and are looking at aspects of the weathering. They seem remarkably young to be interested in the lithology of limestone (the science of the nature and composition of stones and rocks). In terms of geological study walks, this must rank as amongst the best anywhere in Ireland, stirring who knows what in their youthful and agile minds. They unpack their foilwrapped lunches and make notes. When I ask a teenage boy from a Limerick college what he thought of walking over the rocks and stony pavement, he answers: ‘Limestone is the new rock ’n’ roll’.

  Almost a kilometre away a small party of English botanists – some carrying gardeners’ pads – falls to their knees as though praying, noses to the ground, like bloodhounds sniffing rare flowers. Magnifying glasses and guidebooks by their side, they discuss a particularly fine-looking specimen of bee orchid. It is a delicate flower with a curiosity value way beyond its size. They could well be looking for, or have discovered, buried treasure or precious jewels: a 24-carat Cartier rockrose along with a host of rubies, emeralds and sapphires that would delight the traders of Hatton Garden in London or the jewellery merchants of Ennis, County Clare. Occasionally they shriek with delight but most times speak in reverential tones. This is, after all, botanical holy ground and they have come to worship and revere in a wild garden home to stones left undisturbed for thousands of years because there was no land to plough around them.

  Three bare-kneed women supported by hazel sticks quarter the limestone, stooping over a clump of mountain avens. They are in intimate communion with the ground. Some may even be reduced to tears by their minute encounters with the inner world of flowers. One woman, a well-upholstered sixty-something, calls a cobotanist over to study maidenhair fern sheltering in a damp shadowy cleft. So besotted are they by their treasures that, unseen by them, a hare tiptoes across the clints, reconnoitres the land and gives them a curious stare before darting away at speed. It is May and they are here for their spring love-in with the flora. They have come on a pilgrimage to marvel at two contrasted ecologies, Arctic alpines living strangely together with Mediterranean roommates, cosying up beside each other in a floral super league. Their leader says: ‘The ferns stir my emotions and the orchids fire my imagination.’

  The flora of the Burren has been studied to the last stomata. No other area (apart from the Clare Island survey of 1909–1911) has come under the microscope in such fine detail and been cherished by so many passionate enthusiasts of every hue for such a long period of time. The unique personality of each plant – its architecture, its engineering and its anatomy – has intrigued many. Biologically it is the best-documented portion of land in Ireland. They come here for their theses, their diplomas, their treatises and excavations, to test a hypothesis for the fulfilment of their doctorate papers, for pleasure and for quiet contemplation. They come in twos and threes, in delegations and droves. Some come to potter, others to search, find and record, while some lead others showing off their knowledge of the grandiose names of the flowers. Grants and financial help from all manner of funding organisations are awarded to students, botanical heavyweights and biodiversity checklisters to help in their research. Hours, days, weeks and months of patient study are rewarded with a new scientific line of enquiry. Experts on floristics (the study of what grows where) and those interested in phytosociology (the study of plant communities) spend exciting days here.

  The ground and the sea around the Burren have been intensely inspected attracting scientists and hunter-gathering amateurs questing for the unusual or their own particular goals in this place of complexity. It has seduced antiquarians, historians and travel writers; enthralled botanists, orchidologists, bryologists, pteridologists, zoologists, mycologists, conchologists, and lichenologists. It has enchanted painters, photographers, film-makers, folklorists, cartographers and geographers; intrigued geologists, palaeontologists, archaeologists and geomorphologists; delighted entomologists, ornithologists, mammalogists and lepidopterists; challenged potholers, speleologists and hydrologists; amused, bemused and charmed a host of walkers, rock-climbers, nature worshippers, plant colour specialists and landscape detectives; enticed a string of lovers, loners and losers, hippies and hedonists, butterfly-and moonbeam-chasers, cloud-appreciaters, stargazers, flower-freaks, goat ecologists, deep sea anglers, oceanographers and marine scientists; beguiled a menagerie of escapers, dreamers, dropouts and downwardly mobile misfits, as well as connoisseurs of ocean views, analyzers of silences, body-boarders, riders of great breakers and thrill-seekers.

  For many people, spiritual respite, relaxation and renewal are high on their list of reasons to visit. Others come to gaze at the western skies and seas or simply bask in the sensation of the experience of being here. For these few, it is enough to quaff the salty air and tread the limestone. Anyone with a passion for wildlife, the outdoors and the environment has passed through. Some come just for a holiday – or like me to smell the earth, listen to the silences and watch the dancing light reflect on the pavement.

  Another substrata of life is attracted: the musicians, singers, storytellers, drinkers and pub-crawlers mostly holed up in Doolin, but also found in other isolated pockets such as the Flaggy Shore on the Finavarra peninsula. Hidden from view in caravans lurking in corners of fields, they tend their goats, shoot the breeze, and write their lyrics. Look no farther than Clare for traditional music. The county’s pubs offer some of the best in Ireland with musical towns such as Feakle, Kilrush, Ennis, or Milltown Malbay – the annual Haj for musicians. And in the Burren, in Kilfenora, Ballyvaughan, Doolin and New Quay you may be lucky enough to come across a stirring performance of ‘Geese in the Box’ or ‘Shoe the Donkey’.

  It is also a place for romantics. The organisers of the renowned Lisdoonvarna matchmaking festival, which attracts hordes of single men and women, holds horseback ‘love trails’ around the quiet back roads. They feel if love is to be reached, then the Burren stirs the sap and will ignite an amorous spark. At the end of the festival, the two most eligible attendees are named King and Queen of the Burren.

  In 2007 a new marketing trick was dreamed up to bring in visitors. Leading names from the international corporate speaker circuit were invited. The Burren Leadership Forum began holding what they labelled ‘high-energy’ workshops for speakers from the business world. The idea behind the workshops, called ‘The Art of Possibility’, was to promote the inspirational qualities of the area. The forum was set up by a group of business people who shared a conviction that the landscape would offer an ideal setting for blending serious soul-searching with gentle r
elaxation.

  The Burren is many things to many people. It puzzles, astonishes and excites. It has cast its spell on a wide variety of visitors. Not only did it attract monks, its vivid imagery also fired the imagination of writers, artists, flâneurs and pedestrian adventurer scribblers. The stones have been romanced and versified by a roll-call of poetic fame: Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Betjeman, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have all trodden here. Long before them, Thackeray and De Latocnaye dipped their travelling pens into it. In the twentieth century a stream of erudite and thoughtful Irish wayfarers and wanderers, ranging from the scholarship of Praeger to the enthusiasm of Richard Hayward, were awed by it. Hayward called it ‘mysterious brooding moonscape country’. The topographical writer Seán Jennett described it as a ‘ghostly landscape’.

  In the later part of the twentieth century and early twenty-first a galaxy of outdoor English and Scottish writers including Eric Newby, Robin Neillands, Mike Harding, Christopher Somerville, Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane passed through, giving it their blessing. The travel writer Simon Calder described the Burren as ‘hobbit country’ and said there were ‘enough holes in the ground for a city of hobbits in a terrain that lends itself to intense scampering’. Few of these fleeting faces and feet ever stayed long enough to penetrate its inner depths and delve deep into those holes. They generally celebrate its flora, sample the oysters, toast the stout and praise the scenery and sunsets before moving quickly on to their next location on the western seaboard.