Burren Country

by Paul Clements

  Many illustrious antiquarians and writers have visited the site. Thomas Westropp, an engineer and gentleman antiquarian, was a regular visitor to the Burren at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth. In 1899 he took what is believed to be the first published photograph of what he called ‘Poulnabrone Cromlech’. Given its age, it is remarkably clear, showing a tall man in hat and greatcoat complete with pipe standing erect beside the dolmen with a canny, curious glint as befits a Victorian scholar. Westropp also sketched the dolmen and wrote about ‘the airy poise of its great top slab, which, contrary to the usual practice, slopes towards the west’. A contemporary of his, George Victor Du Noyer, also sketched it, showing off its mound in fine detail.

  Other writers have attempted to capture its spirit. In the 1960s, Richard Hayward called it ‘a most impressive example of its class’. In an accompanying sketch in Hayward’s Munster and the City of Cork, Raymond Piper’s elegant drawing shows off the tilting capstone to great effect under a cloud-filled sky. Seán Jennett described the capstone as ‘cockily asserting itself’; in his guide to the historic monuments of Ireland, the archaeologist Peter Harbison referred to its timeless simplicity ‘rising like a bird about to take off’.

  Besides its human history and animal analogies, rabbits have also penetrated into it. One afternoon I saw a hare standing guard over it, scampering around it several times before hastily taking its leave after sensing my presence. An enterprising farmer once attempted to charge people for access to this national monument but the pay-per-view system never took off and lasted only a number of weeks. In 2001 the State bought the site and 16 acres of land for €380,000 from a local farmer to help control access. It was the most expensive deal for land with exposed limestone pavement in the Burren. A newspaper report at the time quoted the landowner Tommy Byrnes of Newtown, Ballyvaughan, saying he was ‘lonely parting with the dolmen, but happy now that the State will be able to give it adequate protection’.

  As part of a €2.2 million European Union conservation programme over a five-year period from 2004 to 2009, eco-friendly cattle were moved on to the limestone to help control the spread of vegetation. The growth of scrub was seen as the dolmen’s biggest environmental threat. The idea was that the cows would ‘manicure’ the land by controlling the scrub, which, in turn, would help increase the biodiversity and improve the quality of the nearby water. The cattle were brought in to graze the site several times a year and the scheme proved successful as well as giving tourists an unexpected photo-opportunity.

  Around the same time, the marketing people were infiltrating the area to fill the vacuum of a lack of hard on-site knowledge with the erection of three lengthy, colourful information signboards – relatively tastefully done, as much as these can ever be tasteful. After all, the dolmen has stood uninterpreted for thousands of years until someone in an office suddenly decided what a good idea it would be to tell the public about its significance. In one swoop of a copywriter’s pen a large element of the mystery and a little piece of the magic surrounding it is removed. No longer are visitors allowed simply to draw their own confusions. But they can still read it as they find it, tap into their ancestral yearning, and guess at its meaning. The dolmen creates imaginative possibilities; its distinctive shape has prompted many a simile and metaphor. It has fancifully been called a launching pad for a stone-age missile, likened to a primitive statue of an elephant, and the capstone compared to a giant’s dining room table.

  On a hot September day I chatted to some visitors from Chicago who had disgorged from their coach to survey the dolmen on what they excitedly called their ‘power-sightseeing’ tour of Ireland. Is this rock real? I heard one woman ask. One of the men, who introduced himself as Bert, referred to it as a ‘Neolithic outhouse’. Gazing hard at me with a serious look, eyes squinting in the sun and just visible under a black baseball cap, he asked po-facedly: ‘Did you know the guy who’s buried here, friend?’ He breaks into a wide smile and we get talking. Bert told me he was a retired engineer and draughtsman. The dolmen had, he said, ‘knocked the socks off him’.

  ‘It’s kinda reassuring in a way, you understand what I’m saying, friend? We like old things and coming here to see your castles and dolmens have a great appeal for us.’

  Jotting down figures in a notebook, he sets about a mathematical calculation working out its weight and sizing up its jagged geometry. ‘Eight feet across by ten feet long and it’s tapering … right? Say one foot thick – these are approximate … right?’

  He puzzles, goes down on his hunkers to look underneath, and then stands on tiptoes scrutinising the capstone. ‘I’d say there’s eighty cubic feet in the roof and if we multiply that by the weight per foot, that works out roughly at one-hundred-and forty pounds plus by eighty equals eight thousand pounds, or four ton. That’s an estimate but I can guaran-damn-tee you it’s not too far out. You understand, friend? S’pity we couldn’t speak to the people who built it.’

  Before departing Bert produces his new slim trim Samsung camera and asks me to photograph him standing in front of the dolmen. ‘It’s got optical zoom and it’s fitted with something called autoscene recognition which is just as well for me as I’ve trouble switching it on.’

  Mellowed by time and weather, the site is now roped off to prevent tourists walking, crawling, patting, pawing, pinching, embracing, caressing and tape measuring the dolmen in a quest for its exact proportions. This has meant an end to the up close and personal, tactile ‘stroke-me pleasure’. No longer can people stand on top of it or underneath it, pretending they are holding up the soaring roof stone by themselves. In 2009 the Office of Public Works appointed a full-time warden to keep an eye on the site. He told me that several teenagers once brought along golf clubs to tee-off while standing on top of the capstone. These antics led to it being roped off and mean that visitors miss out on the experience of the touchy-feely kamenitzas.

  A small sign that has now been removed described it as a burial place of the ‘special’ dead. The meaning of special was not spelled out but archaeologists believe that because of the number of individuals interred here it can hardly represent a Neolithic community and must therefore be regarded as a special place. There is no human habitation but plenty of visitors. On an average summer’s day you will hear a mix of transatlantic, European and Asian voices. Early one spring evening a young mid-west American woman was in thrall of the silence of the place. The only sound was the call of the cuckoo – described by Wordsworth as ‘a wandering voice’ – echoing across the limestone. I was struck by the sorrowful beauty in her face and watched as tears rolled from her eyes. I enquired as to what had caused her sad state. She had been travelling across Europe, she said, and was pining for home and her parents. The only cuckoo she had ever heard before was in the clock in her Minnesota home. For her, Poulnabrone was a true place of sorrows, a place of lacrimae rerum.

  I too have lingered here, overdosing in the noiseless evening air as darkness descends and the cuckoo rinses the night air. The sun hangs tantalisingly behind the dolmen, then suddenly winks a farewell and the last of the light is snuffed out. In the rich afterglow of a moonlit night, there is a mystical feel. I reflect on the meaning and significance of this solemn and spectacular monument that has been a silent witness to many aspects of Irish history. I have often wondered how the builders managed to raise the mighty capstone into position, what inspired them and who they were. Whichever method they used must have been a considerable feat, manoeuvring and levering it on to the upright stones. The limestone flags supplied the builders with their raw materials so they did not have to carry it a long distance before erection.

  But they still must have had to sweat. The ghosts of the builders are silent and although time has yielded a greater understanding there are still unanswered questions. The individuals who built it had their own reasons: was it chieftain, queen or priestess, and why did they choose this specific location? Did they regard it then as a sacred
landscape? Was it a place with magical powers? No written records exist from the time, so speculation surrounds the answers to these and many other riddles. The attraction of the place is the mystery and guesswork, and the fact that no one knows the dolmen’s exact tonnage, its spiritual or social significance or the reasons for the numerous artefacts that were uncovered in the 1980s.

  In an essay ‘Stones in Seventeen Frames’ about the Maen Ceti burial chamber in the Gower peninsula, Wales, Menna Elfyn discusses how these ancient builders worked:

  Conspirato is what was needed to raise that twenty-five-ton enigma of a capstone. The company of others to breathe together, to conspire. A tug of stones. That lift of common imagination.

  Under a sickle moon, there is an inscrutable whiff of secrecy and eeriness about being abroad and alone at night. Occasionally a car passes, its lights throwing up a gleam on the roadside momentarily breaking the darkness. Aside from this there is no noise. It is a place of cathedral-like silences and sorrows. Rooted to its grandiose solitary spot, it stands as an exquisite sculptural set piece with a sense of timelessness. There are times I feel sorry for it, yet its ego seems to carry it and the reputation of its image precedes it. It speaks across the centuries and has stood through thousands of winters with generations of legends and mythology wrapped around it. On numerous visits I have never felt lonely here, perhaps only ever experiencing an occasional charge of the melancholy that is inherent in the air.

  Over the years dozens of knee-high doorway-shaped mini Poulnabrones have been erected all around by visiting twenty-first century freelance megalithomaniacs to emulate the mother of all dolmens and keep it company in the long dark nights. Some of the small dolmens built here have been arranged with care. They resemble the style and embody the spirit of the mysterious stone figures known as inuksuit found throughout the Arctic. For the Inuit, theirs are objects of veneration defining the geography of the spiritual landscape. The Inuit look through these rectangular-shaped windows to see if there is a sightline which may have been intended by the builders.

  No one can say with certainty the intention of the Poulnabrone builders. But there it stands, self-confidently embedded on a grassy mound, a primordial prima donna among dolmens, an exuberant head-turning show-stealer, a cynosure casting its spell and attracting its own band of paparazzi resembling at times a gallery jostling at a film premiere. Sanctified by several hundred years of sightseeing and wave after wave of humans, it has achieved celebrity status and a pulling-power all its own.

  As a posse of German visitors prepares to leave, they steal one last glance on their way back to their minibus. Before departing from the drystone wall at the roadside, they align the Big One in their camera lens. Time for one last photo-opportunity of an enduring totem, one final mass salvo of clicks, a mini orchestra of digital technology filling memory cards, accompanied as dusk descends by theatrical flashes of light. One man wearing a white jersey with ‘Deutschland’ in black lettering on the back performs a 360-degree pirouette, twirling slowly on one foot with all the precision of Rudolf Nureyev, capturing the dolmen in its surrounding wider limestone home. He proudly produces his Coolpix Nikon camera pointing out its intelligent sweep panorama button and triumphantly showing me his image.

  The best times to shoot the dolmen are at dusk and dawn, during what photographers call the ‘magic hours’. Before boarding their bus, the Germans review their images on the LCD screen, talking of the publishing possibilities it offers. If the photographs that have been taken here over the years were laid out, they would cover millions of square metres. In an area with scores of wedge tombs, ring forts, and cashels to choose from, Poulnabrone is incontrovertibly unassailable. In any dolmen hall of fame, its unique overwhelming presence distinguishes it from the mass of others. There is no contest. Its attachment to the Burren is age-old, permanent and inseparable.

  It is a place, not only of unceasing wonderment, but also of romance, mystery and flash photography. On each visit it is good to have been here, to have been spiritually uplifted and have spent time loitering in this pool of ‘photogenic’ sorrowness. There are few better places to watch the evening light congeal in a site for the special dead, blessed with a special virtue, in the bosom of the Burren and in a place some call the soul of Ireland.

  Poulnabrone dolmen stone in evening light © Marty Johnston

  4

  A Tour through the Paint Box

  To know a physical place you must become intimate with it. You must open yourself to its textures, its colours in varying day and night lights, its sonic dimensions. You must in some way become vulnerable to it. In the end, there’s little difference between growing into the love of a place and growing into the love of a person.

  Barry Lopez, Extreme Landscape

  The colours, smells, sights and sounds work subtly on the imagination. Sometimes they are striking or symbolic. Our journey starts with the visual treats found on a colour-questing tour in some unlikely places. The spectrum of colours interlocks in a collage of greys, blues and greens, which are the three that remain constant. You will find prismatic flowers, sometimes offering striking contrasts in tone and an intriguing juxtaposition. A walk through the paint box is a lesson in colour geometry but some days it can seem as if there is no living colour.

  In the Burren’s hierarchical colour supremacy, grey dominates. From a distance, there is a solemn monochromatic mutedness to the limestone. The grey outdoor architecture can be either boring or fascinating, depending on your point of view. It can be difficult to come up with the precise colour description but in some lights it looks bleached-out, a landscape divested of technicolor. At first sight it is overwhelming in its teeming uniform greyness: pale grey, or ash grey as opposed to the darker grey of charcoal featured in clouds. Sometimes, as the light works its special effect, it becomes a greyish white or even greyish blue. There are myriad greys. On different visits, in different seasons, my notebooks contain descriptions of the analogous greys, a symphony in shades offering a galaxy of greys that would enhance the tint range in any paint company’s chart: battleship or dreadnought, gunmetal, dove, smoke, a dull pewterish, platinum, the shade of elephant skin, the hue of a pigeon’s breast, or the plumage of a heron or curlew. The depthless grey of a sombre sky accompanied by a murky cloak of mizzle adds another dynamic. On sunless days, with a lack of cheer, you want to shake a view out of the impenetrable greyness but the stubborn mist will not allow you. The hills remain undercover, the walls motionless.

  There are times when the top layers of hillside terracing have a rutilant or purple glare and the visitor looking at it for the first time mistakes it for swathes of bell heather. At other times it is an incandescent, glowing light. Long after each visit it is grey – a calm, often cool or neutral grey – that overpowers as a colour imprinted in the mind. In terms of the equipoise of land, sea and sky, the palette consists of only three colours: grey, grey and grey. Only when it is contemplated in its assorted moods does the visitor discover that far from being monochromatic, the landscape is polychromatic.

  Mother Nature has been generous with the Burren greenery and impressive eruptions of green corridors form everywhere. This pigment even has its own name. Spend long enough walking in the dark evenings across the fields around Ballyvaughan and you will eventually stumble across a spectacular moth first caught in 1949. The Burren green (Calamia tridens, subspecies Occidentalis) is a lime-green, inch-long species that delights photographers and naturalists alike. It is an apt – if slightly parochial – name for a striking insect. It was discovered near Gort by Eric Classey from London who organised the first entomological expedition to the Burren. He died in 2008 and, because of his Burren find, merited a generous obituary in the London Independent.

  Verdure transforms the land freshened by rain but in all its multifarious shades, green plays second fiddle as the colour that overpowers after your eyes have switched from grey. Viridescence is round every corner and to the fore on the drove or green roads.
It takes over from the minutiae of the wild flowers. Ferns, mosses, holly, grasses, hedges, bracken and the verdant drapery of trees produce a gallery of green: every shade to please chlorophilia addicts from bottle to pea, and from the bright and glittering dark green tumbling cascades of ivy to the exuberant green leaves breaking out on the twigs of beech trees and the pastel green of the young hart’s-tongue fern. The woods throw up sticky-looking green spindle, an olive-green on the oak leaves, the darker green of juniper bent in the winds, the bristly green leaves of wild madder with straggling stems, the glossy green and treacly-thick deep green of the vegetation, or the stunning bright green of a field that stands out at Muckinish. On a clear summer’s day of strong sunshine the gentle, dappled rays filter through the hazel trees on the lower slopes of Eagle’s Rock at Keelhilla lighting up harebell with greenery ranging from the shade of the insides of cucumber to lovat.

  The alchemy of new life in the spring recapitulation brings with it a mix of floral associations speckling the ground with a kaleidoscope of cheerful-looking colours straight from a pointillist’s palette. When you examine the detail of nature’s infinite subtleties of shade and small rock flowers, and only when you get down on your knees, do you truly begin to appreciate the range, combination and collisions of resplendent colours clinging stubbornly to the limestone. Some are grouped tightly together in clusters of ten or twenty. Like sun-kissed, freckled, happy children, they thrive with an appearance of healthiness and luxuriance. They are delicate and extremely rare flowers, yet there are thousands, mass-produced it almost seems, for the tourist market. Sometimes towards the tail-end of spring and before the proper onset of summer, a few last lingering ones look weather-worn but pick the right moment and, like Tiffany’s jewellery with the dissonances of daring colour combinations, the majority will bedazzle you.