Burren Country Read online

  Countless natural history books and glossy tomes on Ireland have featured the area en passant. Authors, radio broadcasters and celebrity television presenters who have an interest in natural history have come in pursuit of adding to their knowledge. Most call it a ‘strange, bare’ landscape, giving a flavour of the flowers and its geological past. One of the most curious of these titles, Ireland: The Land and the People by Donald Cowie, published in 1976, referred to the Atlantic air sweeping across the limestone terraces where ‘the peasants have the pride and independence of shepherds’. They were perhaps Ireland’s last remaining peasantry.

  One walker who has returned for several visits is the Bristol-based landscape artist Richard Long. He has romanced the Burren stones in a different way – through realignment, stone sculpture and photography. One of his most evocative black and white images, A Circle in Ireland (1975), features an area near the coast at Doolin with the Cliffs of Moher as a backdrop. Shards of stones are arranged in a circle around a section of limestone pavement which the artist photographed. He regards his photographs as a testament to his presence, representing an image that stands for the whole experience of the walk. Stones are an essential part of Long’s life and work. On his walks, he repositions scattered stones laying them in simple geometric configurations in lines, circles or ovoid patterns. Although he may adjust the natural order of wilderness places, perhaps up-ending stones, he never makes major alterations to the landscape.

  In my first few days of acclimatising on each visit I like to rock-hop over the pavement, reacquainting myself with some of the precise geological terms applicable to this karst landscape. Karst is a general term for an area formed by weathering of soluble rocks and named after a region of Slovenia. The slabs of pavement and fractures in between them are known as clints and grykes. Clints are the blocks of limestone pavement – some wobbly – which you walk across; grykes are the open crevices or chasms within the clints that many unwittingly trip over. (Praeger had a variation of this description calling them joints and chinks.) Like a puzzle, the clints fit together in an even and sometimes uneven manner.

  Since I first came across them many years ago, the words clints and grykes have stuck in my head; two small words that are always useful to drop into casual conversation with friends: ‘Doing anything nice at the weekend?’ ‘Heading to Clare to look at the clints and grykes.’ The dry lakes, called turloughs, are grassy hollows often filled with water in the winter which dries up in the summer. The one seen from Cassidy’s bar in Carron looks like an oasis in a grey Sahara. It is in a polje, an enclosed depression, which is an area in a hollow surrounded by mountains.

  The large erratic boulders, carried by glacial action and deposited throughout the landscape, are found in all shapes and sizes. Everything about the Burren is rooted in geology which I think has the best words. Words of resonance: sonorous, rich, hard, and memorable; quixotic words, and words to dabble with. The lingua franca of geology has long intrigued me. As a descriptive science its rich vocabulary cannot be beaten. Two of my favourite, fanciful geological words with which I enjoy tussling are ‘kamenitza’, a solution pan or shallow pool of limestone, and ‘rillenkarren’, narrow, sharp-edged solution runnels that form on gently sloping limestone. These runnels, crevasses and hollows are clandestine places.

  When you have mastered the main geological terms relating to the rocks and limestone, the archaeological side – dealing with stones and the remains of buildings – raises its grey and ancient head. On any walk, however short, you come upon singular oddities and strange relics of the past. Littered with ruins of ring forts, churches, castles and abbeys, the Burren is more than just an open-air museum – it is an archaeologically saturated landscape. In nearly all cases their covering has been blown away. They stand open to the sky, exposed to the elements and sometimes home to ravens or crows. The ebb and flow of history has brought with it a land rich in ruins. The past is inescapable. Many different eras and levels of human history surround you on all sides. The tourist authorities market it as ‘A walk through time’. I pose questions for myself. Who built these forts? How long have they been here? What purpose did they serve? The Burren confuses and perplexes.

  Ruins have always attracted me and there are rich pickings here. There is one special place, Corcomroe Abbey, beyond Bell Harbour, a flat 8-km bike ride from Ballyvaughan. Founded as a Cistercian monastery, it was named Petra Fertilis, ‘The Fertile Rock’. It lies in a bowl, in the shadow of Abbey Hill on one side, Turlough Hill on the other, and Moneen Mountain to its west. It is in the valley of Glennamannagh, ‘the valley of the monks’, a quiet place of sanctity inspiring a mood of reflection. It is easy to see why the monks chose it as a haven of tranquillity. The abbey is well-preserved and for 900 years has added a touch of nobility and grandeur to the countryside. On one visit, a man from the heritage service told me about the high quality floral stone carvings at the eastern end of the church. Legend has it, he said, that the stonemasons who built it around 1205 were killed when they had completed the job to prevent them building a more beautiful church somewhere else.

  Rock climbers come to the Burren because it offers some of Ireland’s best challenges. I like the grim drollery of the imaginative appellations bestowed by them to their climbs: The Revolution will not be Televised, Mad Mackerel, Preacher-Heckler, Atomic Rooster, Up in Smoke, Moments of Inertia, Tombstone Terror, Hooked on Crack, Peanut Butter Special, Obscene Sardine, Damn the Torpedoes, and Hopeless Acts of Desperation. These are from an area called Ailladie which, for rock climbers, I have always found to be an amusing translation: Aill an Daill – ‘The Blind Man’s Cliff’. Farther along the coast, at the Cliffs of Moher is the headland of Aill na Searrach, (affectionately nicknamed Aileen) towering over one of the world’s most famous surfing spots.

  Inexhaustible kilometres of ancient stone walls, magnificently built, yet with a seemingly higgledy-piggledy, thrown-together appearance, stretch up to cairns at the top of many of the Burren’s hills where small knots and piles of stones are assembled. In the 1980s Ballyvaughan used to boast a chic restaurant Trí na cheile which translates as ‘through-other’, an apt description for the jumbled walls. It is estimated that Ireland has approximately 390km of stone field walls – the most of any country in the world; a large proportion of them are found in the Burren.

  Threading in all directions, they are the ribs and backbone of the place, an exoskeleton providing support and protection for animals. The stones to build this theme park of walls come in strange, mixed shapes and sizes: round, flat, square, oblong, rectangular. Some protrude out of the earth with sharp edges. Tall, thin, upright ones, like collapsed dominoes, lie drunkenly against each other for support. Some stand like headstones in graveyards. Long rows are stitched together in an orderly way and have a uniformity about them; others splaying at skew-whiff angles look jumbled, wedged haphazardly, balanced miraculously in a disorganised fretwork seemingly serpentining into infinity. Yet they are fundamental components of the landscape and have an element of artistry to them.

  I have puzzled over where they start and finish. Who decides where the boundaries are and to whom do they belong? The walls mark out the boundaries of the different areas but because many have collapsed or are obsolete their divisions are not clear. Wall aficionados come to study the patterns. There are several types all with different stone arrangements. These include shelter walls, slab walls (fixed into the grykes with upended limestone flags) tumble walls, single stone walls and double walls. They are sculpted into the contours of the landscape, but most visitors do not appreciate their lightly worn beauty. The walls are a familiar and essential feature of the outdoor life of the place. A monument to craftsmanship from a bygone age, they stand like forgotten relics, yet the spirits of the past still live in their stone legacy.

  The Burren can drown you in statistics. Hundreds of biological, geological and archaeological facts are offered up to first-time visitors stopping them in their tracks. The unexpected
hits you round every corner. Guidebook figures inform you matter-of-factly that there are 10 types of willow tree, 23 orchids, 24 different species of dandelion, 25 ferns, 30 species of butterflies, 50 grasses, 70 land snails, 84 recorded examples of wedge-tombs, 254 caves, 270 moths, 450 ring forts (or 500 depending on which book you read) and at least 700 plant species, including trees and ferns, have been documented. Archaeologists have recorded more than 2,000 monuments, three times the national average. The two main types of rock, the Carboniferous limestone and the Clare Shales, were deposited between 320 and 360 million years ago. In the building of Cahercommaun cliff fort, 16,500 cubic metres of stone were used, and there are 36,000 hectares of limestone pavement which equates to ten times more than in Britain. More shrubby cinquefoil grows here than anywhere else in western Europe.

  The Burren feels good about itself. It is not averse to gushing promotion of its image. It is a place of startling numbers and factoids that bamboozle you as you try to get your head round them and work out where they all came from and how they ended up here. Although the Burren represents just 1 per cent of the landmass of Ireland, 70 per cent of its native species is found here. Information and figures on an international scale are thrown up about the place and they always astound.

  There are enough facts – enough biggest, best, oldest, longest and deepest – to grace a page of the Guinness Book of World Records. The biggest turlough in Europe is at Carron (best viewed from the comfort of Cassidy’s, a former police barracks and now a pub); the largest (reputedly) free-hanging stalactite in the world, the Great Stalactite at 7m, is found at Pól an Ionáin cave near Doolin; the Polnagollum complex on the eastern side of Slieve Elva is thought to be the longest cave system in western Europe with 16km of mapped passages. It is also believed to be the cave that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings character Gollum and in 2010 a website was set up to promote the connection; the slow-worm, a small, legless lizard, was first seen here in 1971 and the Burren has the only Irish breeding colony of the creature; the first colony of the only Irish location of the land winkle (Pomatias elegans) was discovered on a northwest-facing slope on an isolated peninsula near New Quay in July 1976. Lurking under cushions of vegetation on the exposed edges of limestone slabs and clinging to the sides of the grykes, P. elegans thrilled the Irish mollusc world.

  There is a veritable landslide of commentary on the Burren. Mountains of reports and papers have been written on a multitude of different aspects of the place – most of it published in the past 150 years. One of the earliest was Frederick Foot’s paper on the distribution of plants in the Burren which was read to the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) on 28 April 1862. Published in the Academy’s august journal, it stretches to twenty pages. In 1911, according to Praeger on a visit to the Burren, distinguished botanists from the International Phytogeographical Excursion discussed the topic of patches of thin peat directly over the limestone.

  Since the early 1990s there has been renewed vigour with more masterly papers added to the ever-growing pile. Many of these clearly are not intended for the general reader. Thumbing through the library in the Burren College of Art at Newtown Castle one wet morning, I came across references to hundreds of articles published in a huge variety of journals covering everything from the flora to caves, and from aspects of biological weathering to fluid inclusion studies combined with rare earth element geochemistry of Burren fluorite veins. Scores of scholarly papers have been published in any number of esoteric journals to satisfy the craving for knowledge, whether for academics or amateur history buffs.

  The Proceedings of the RIA contain many articles featuring scientific studies of the Burren and could form a magisterial book on its own. The Academy, with its admirable motto ‘We Will Endeavour’, has produced papers on many arcane topics and investigations carried out in the region as well as supporting much new research. In 2003, it published nine scientific papers on experimentally based studies in a single volume called Understanding the Burren. Using random selection, I made a note of some of the obscure topics studied:

  – a two-site study, in October 1999 and April 2000, which examined the physico-chemical characteristics and the macro invertebrate communities of the Caher River, the only river that rises in the Burren;

  – a three-year study (1997–1999) looked at sporocarp abundance in plots of Dryas octopetala and assessed the relationships among macro fungi, vegetation and soil variables;

  – a year-long survey produced a comparative assessment of the phytoplankton and charophytes of Lough Bunny, a karst lake in the eastern Burren;

  – another paper looked at the issues that concern plant ecologists reviewing ideas that had been used to explain the pattern of grassland and heath communities in Europe and apply them to the special case of the Burren.

  Leafing through Tearmann: Irish journal of agri-environmental research reveals lengthy articles with titles such as ‘Nutrient dynamics of Sesleria-dominated grasslands in the Burren National Park’, and ‘Productivity, grazing pressure and phenology of a limestone grassland’. A flick through some journals throws up intriguing titles: ‘Three days among the bats in Clare’ (Zoologist), ‘The spatial distribution of turloughs’ (Irish Geography), ‘The vegetation of solution cups in the limestone of the Burren’ (Journal of Ecology), ‘Genecological differentiation of leaf morphology in Geranium sanguineum’ (New Phystologist), ‘My hobby about ferns and its results, Personal reminiscences’ (Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club) and a raft of other essays in journals ranging from the Entomologist’s Gazette to the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter.

  Just when you thought there was nothing left to explore, information (and funding) emerges that sends the scientists off on a new probe – a potentially messy study involving a research team from NUI Galway scrutinising Burren cow dung. The team included a German PhD research fellow funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, and investigated coprophilous fungal spores growing on cattle and sheep. For their work, which was carried out between Cappanawalla Mountain and Black Head, they dug out peat sods which had preserved the spores. Through radiocarbon dating, this led to a clearer picture of the impact of human activity and farming in the Burren over the last 3,500 years.

  A large body of published work exists on the ecology of turloughs including their habitats and their biota. A study on the amphibious lifestyles, the sensitivities of the organisms in adapting to depth, temperature or frequency and the pattern of floating as well as possibilities for conservation have intrigued hydrologists. Ecological comparisons of water bodies have been made, with detailed notes on the hemipetra, coleopetra, diptera and other invertebrates in Burren turlough studies. Very little, on the other hand, has been written about the doline lakes south of Mullaghmore. Beetle experts were very excited in the early part of this century when they discovered a rare beetle that lives only in the blue-green algae crust of one of the lakes.

  Turloughs throw up some curiosities of nature. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the appearance of strange, white, algal paper, or bleached alga, at a turlough appropriately near the village of Turlough in a valley south of Bell Harbour animated many Burren regulars. The story of this rare sight is recounted by Mary Scannell in the January 1972 edition of the Irish Naturalists’ Journal. She describes how a visitor from the Liverpool Botanic Society approached the lough on a sunny day in May thinking it was an apparent snowfield:

  The sheeted alga was so thick in some areas as to resemble parchment in texture and colour, in other parts it was of gossamer fineness. Bushes were covered with hammocks of webbed alga, stone walls bore white shawls tasselated where the weight of wet material had pulled away from the dried portion, boulders were draped with bleached shapes as though tablecloths had been laid out to dry and whiten. On traversing the white carpet in the hot midday sun, a dazzling reflection afflicted the eyes making it necessary to shade them from the glare. The German seventeenth-century naturalist I. J. Hartman expl
ained this ‘paper’ as having fallen from heaven and being of meteoric nature.

  Generations of butterfly hunters with their nets and collecting bags have been drawn to the area to spend long days studying the dazzling iridescence of butterflies’ wings. The Burren is a butterfly-friendly ‘hot-spot’. The aurelians (a fancy named for lepidopterists) come, praying for sunny weather, and are often rewarded. During a five-minute period in early July 2008, at a butterfly site at Termon, they recorded twenty-six individual Dark Green Fritillaries. Scientists like grid references and can pinpoint the exact breeding ground of the Marsh Fritillary covering an area only 280m by 90m. More than thirty different species of butterfly (including twenty-six residents) have been noted in the Burren. Some are more widespread than others and a few are scarce or local. But whatever time of the summer, each species – from the Common Blue to the Brown Hairstreak – is a part of the natural and cultural identity of the landscape.

  Twenty-two of Ireland’s leading bee specialists descended on the Burren for a weekend Bee Blitz of apitherapy in July 2010. Along the coast at Fanore Beg they identified a new population of the Great Yellow Bumblebee (Bombus distinguendus) which is threatened with extinction. Under the auspices of the National Biodiversity Data Centre in Waterford, the apidologists carried out detailed systematic surveys of the area which contains three-quarters of all the species of bumblebee found in Ireland. The Burren is important for bumblebees because it is species-rich and is home to many rare bees. Colonies of the Shrill carder bee (Bombus sylvarum) with its famed high-pitched buzz, and the Red-shanked carder bee (Bombus rudararius) make the Burren by far the most important location for them in Ireland or Britain.