Burren Country

by Paul Clements

  Eastwards the limestone continues for a few kilometres before giving way to a technicolor landscape of vegetation, forests and fields with farms and outbuildings. Half-a-dozen rectangular lakes sit undisturbed with trees reflected in the water. Small settlements are visible leading to Gort. In the far distance, the Slieve Aughty Mountains, a long, low range of hills, mark the limit of visibility. I count eight windmills on the western section. Thankfully, these blights on the countryside have not protruded this far. Westwards the clouds turn dark. A long, high ridge blocks any view beyond to the sea or the western side of the Burren. The ridge is a mixture of rock and green fields divided by hedges and trees. Every hundred metres or so, a farmhouse or bungalow sits in alignment to the road. Cattle and sheep mingle sharing the grass below the cliff face. An orange tractor idles at a farm building, the only sign of life I have seen from the summit. Mullaghmore and the area immediately surrounding it represent the Burren in miniature. Lough Gealáin is a ring of bright water. It is a lake or turlough that performs conjuring tricks: now you see it, now you don’t – although not quite at such high speed. These self-contained ephemeral turloughs dry up in the summer and fill again in the winter.

  I often amuse myself on mountaintops by noting what is not here – what the eye cannot see. Missing from the landscape in this case are energetic mountain streams, cascading waterfalls, TV and phone masts, electricity pylons, very little noise-making activity, and the human voice. Occasionally, on these moments, I indulge myself, reflecting on the inner silence: a time and a place to be rid of personal problems, of heavy burdens and anxieties; a place to see the light, shapes, and textures of the landscape in all their infinite variety. If Mullaghmore is the Ayers Rock of Ireland, then it is a good place to experience the Dream Time like the Aboriginal people in Australia. Like them, I too believe in the power of dreams which is why I keep a dream journal by my bedside and handy for a mountaintop siesta. Edward Abbey tells us that in the Dream Time the wise old men of the outback say we made our beginning, from the Dream Time we come, and into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return.

  Mullaghmore is a place where you are alone with your thoughts … or at least where I thought I was. Out of the corner of my eye I feel a watching presence, glimpse a movement and hear a gentle rustle. Over my right shoulder, a party of eight feral goats, including a kid with white shaggy hair, has arrived unobtrusively 50m from me. Gathered in silent colloquia, they stare at me intently with profound and attentive watchfulness. I stare back. They have come to inquire as to my place on their land. They stare at each other before contemplating me again with an indignant yet vigilant look. The glaring contest lasts for five minutes. They seem a bit stand-offish. I feel they are looking down their large noses at me, uncertain of this intruder in their midst. Several have long unkempt beards. Three are brown and white, three are milk chocolate and two are milk-white, one with a black beard. Like Ted Hughes’ horses, they stand ‘megalith-still’. Suddenly one with a pure white coat breaks this peaceful tableau vivant, lifts its leg and comically scratches an ear. I imagine they do not perceive me as any threat, nor are they going to attack me, but they do not appear to want to come closer. They seem to have taken mild umbrage that I have invaded their high territory. I feel a slight sense of unease at being watched but gradually warm to their presence. Being born under the sign of Capricorn, I have always had an admiration for goats. I unzip the side pocket of my rucksack and take out my leather hip flask. The sun temporarily pokes its way through clouds. Silently, I sip my Burren ‘tea’, offering a quiet toast to my ear-scratching four-legged friends: here’s lookin’ at you, kids.

  Behind the façade of serenity, Mullaghmore has had a troubled recent history. How different it might all have been. A proposal, regarded by many as outrageous, to build an interpretative centre at the base of the mountain caused a ten-year debate in the 1990s, generating thousands of words of heated argument. It was an emotionally divisive battle unleashing passionate protest voices, arousing controversy and stirring enflamed feelings. It stimulated writers, poets and musicians into creative action, angered environmentalists, and served as a wake-up call to those who care about the landscape on their doorstep. But not everyone was against the development and there was considerable local support for it on the strength of job-creation and the amount of revenue it would generate for the local economy. In a colourful quote, a local councillor described the opposition to the centre as ‘blow-ins, hippies, homosexuals, drug smokers, intellectuals and non meat-eaters’. After a long, vigorous and expensive campaign by the Burren Action Group the plan was finally seen off in the spring of 2000. By that stage excavations and preparations were already under way for a car park.

  Looking across the calcified landscape unsullied by human activity, I reflect on the desecration that has taken place and how it might appear to a futurologist if the developers had their way. Spooling forward to the 2050s, I imagine that if the interpretative centre had been built, by this stage it would have reached spoilation level: the visionary splendour of the place is no more. By mid-twenty-first century the uglification of this one-time sacred precinct is complete. Flights land with regularity at Mullaghmore International Airport depositing sightseers and trippers. The clamour of thousands of visitors each week bring an assortment of litter, noise pollution, fumes from traffic and buildings, the whole visual wear and tear, including the impact of people scrambling over the fragile walls, tramping on the flowers and showing complete disregard for the environment. On a busy week in summer more than 50,000 people are to be found here.

  Traffic is queuing to fill the car parks with a maelstrom of tour coaches, minibuses, RVs, 4WDs, land cruisers, super-jeeps with 64-inch tyres, motor homes and the most hateful of all these contraptions, the so-called ‘mega-people carriers’. Consider the length of the human congas for the toilet blocks, tearooms and audiovisual presentations. All the things people go into the hills to escape from are gone, the magic destroyed. By now it is a wounded and damaged landscape, lacerated and stained with the blotches of visitors and their cars, contaminated with their collective detritus and, worst of all, their noise footprint. I am thankful that I brought my ear defenders along with me to celebrate my nonagenarian years. Small parties sit at tables in the blinding March sunshine outside the newly opened Limestone Pavement Bar where a group of three musicians is entertaining the crowds. Two rival hotels have sprouted up and are fully booked each weekend throughout the summer. Large signposts point the visitor in the direction of ‘Mullaghmore: The Mysterious Wonder Walk Path’. It is just one of a network of man-made walkways that in some cases involved tearing up or obscuring sections of precious pavement. We have spoiled the place we love.

  On top of all this, climate change has had a big bearing on how the Burren looks more than forty years on with spring starting in mid-January. The Burren spring conference is held in December and the annual Burren in Bloom festival, which we recall took place throughout May, has been brought forward to February. Although most flowers have endured and the tough mountain avens, gentians and orchids continue to flourish in large numbers (the early purple orchids now bloom in December), some plants and trees are having trouble adapting to the rising temperatures and there is an alarming threat of extinctions. Untroubled by the earth’s warming, the glacial erratics are holding firm while the karst has not altered fundamentally although the continuing encroachment of hazel has penetrated into many more areas.

  Fields that in the early part of the twenty-first century were bright green are now parched brown, the result of hotter springs and summers in the intervening four decades. It is still a place of paradoxes. Rainfall has increased dramatically leading to the limestone dissolving in areas that were much admired by visitors back in 2010. But against this, the Caher River, the only overground river in the Burren, has completely dried out and followed the example of the summer turloughs. Sea surface temperatures have risen dramatically each decade since the turn of the century and the wa
ves at the famed surfing spot near the Cliffs of Moher have more than trebled in size.

  Thankfully the concertina is still an essential part of Clare’s social fabric and the musical climate is as powerful as ever. The new foot-tapping songs from the three-man group sitting outside the bar include ‘Forty Shades of Beige’, ‘The Wearin’ o’ the Brown’ and ‘Four Sunburnt Fields’.

  This fleeting glimpse of the future may sound impossibly gloomy, botanically unlikely and musically improbable. Although I have taken a fanciful leap into the future, some of it is based on scientific speculation in a report in 2008 entitled ‘Changing Shades of Green’ produced by the Irish American Climate Project. The main findings of the report on how climate change will affect Ireland predict large differences in rainfall: up to 12 per cent more during the winters and up to 12 per cent less in the summers, as well as more frequent bog bursts and the loss of the potato as an important commercial crop because of harsh droughts.

  Environmental and cultural changes of the future remain the realm of crystal ball gazers and no one can say with any degree of certainty exactly how Ireland or the Burren will look by the 2050s. The report is loaded with a number of shallow, speculative phrases couched in terms such as ‘could be’, ‘may be’ and ‘remains to be seen’. Who can possibly predict what oil resources will be like, whether we will be driving vehicles at all, or if we will have used up so much that we have come full circle and returned again to a simple, eco-friendly, pastoral people walking, cycling and dancing at the crossroads.

  To come back to the present, ironically the very act of driving to visit a precious landscape contributes to its degradation. It is true to say there is a contradiction because I arrived and will leave by car. Meekly, in my defence, I can only quote Walt Whitman:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself

  I am large, I contain multitudes.

  I have come alone with only the wind and birds for company, and will respect what is here. My point is if you multiply one vehicle one thousandfold, or even one hundredfold, you are left with the following audio: engines thrumming, doors slamming, exhausts revving, horns honking, radios blaring, and the general stench and brouhaha of families, holidaymakers, and thousands of daytrippers (mostly tripping over the clints). The nuances of the landscape, the mood of the place, and the atmosphere mean little to them. Coach tours and mountains do not go together. They are an unhappy juxtaposition. They have different priorities. As bedfellows, they are not just strange, they are manifestly incompatible. Had this development gone ahead, there would have been no aural contest between the collision of the sounds of human technology and the sounds of nature.

  Another issue surrounding the controversy over the interpretative centre related to the quality of life of local people, brought about by the pressure on roads that were not built to cope with high volumes of traffic. The saga raised questions about why a silvery-grey stony place needs interpretation, or, as one local referred to it, an ‘interruptive’ centre. Undoubtedly there is much to understand, but why spoil, or indeed ‘interrupt’ the very life of the place that you are trying to understand by building on it?

  I watch the shadow of a passing cloud. A flash of sunlight clears the air. With its protracted and vigorous singing, a long-winded skylark brings me back to the present. The bird is hard to see but not hard to hear. Its song reverberates across the hilltop, a delectable sound of Mullaghmore. This reinforces the notion that the key to the mountain is solitude and silence. As a landscape empty of people, it affords peace of mind. It offers a place where you can come to an appreciation of the scope and scale of the scenery, feel alone, withdraw from the crowds, and where the only voice is the voice of the landscape as you indulge in some mental futuristic free-floating.

  The nature writer Michael Viney says of Mullaghmore: ‘No amount of knowledge about its origins in geology and Neolithic overgrazing can diminish its rapt, aboriginal power: it is the Ayers Rock of Ireland, if yet without the tourists clambering over it.’ I have always admired his description of Mullaghmore as ‘an Earth-object of almost hypnotic fascination’. The prosaic meaning of Mullaghmore, or in Irish Mullach Mór, is ‘great summit’. The theologian, philosopher and author John O’Donohue, who died in 2008, summed up in a poem its greatness for him:

  Mullaghmore Mountain is the tabernacle of the Burren, its folded shape evokes a poignancy and a sense of reverence. Once glimpsed it can never be forgotten. The history and the mystery of the Burren come alive in its elegance and silence.

  To the superficial observer, Mullaghmore, like the wider Burren, at first looks drab and featureless. There may appear little that is particularly special about the area. It is not a holy mountain in the vein of Croagh Patrick, 112km to the north with its human motorway to the summit. Mercifully 30,000 people are not to be found climbing it on the last Sunday of July. You come here to take the pulse of the place and feel small in surroundings that are not enormous, but where the sounds that are here are magnified. A place of austere beauty with a strange and compelling power, it is a lodestone – a limestone lodestone – of the highest order by which all is measured; it is a precious place where, after each peregrination, I feel re-energised, uplifted, cleansed and where, to invoke Uncle Walt again, without competition from others, ‘I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’

  Mullaghmore Mountain © Marty Johnston

  7

  Time and Tide

  Bloody-minded sort of place, it looks,

  Where old faiths shrivel, old names are defaced.

  But out of these barren flags, this crazed landscape,

  Jut the resilient heads of a melting-pot

  Of flowers from the high and cold, the low and hot,

  The wet, wet places. All at ease on this rockface.

  Like finding love in someone disliked at first.

  U. A. Fanthorpe, ‘The Burren’

  Adiaphanous aura of faint shifting light plays over the soft air of the Burren hills. The ethereal quality of the light often has a bearing on the colours. There are times when the limestone twinkles and scintillates with a shimmering effect across this mellow landscape. When the sun’s rays catch the summit of Cappanawalla it can reactivate it and look as though a flashlight is shining on it.

  Ceaselessly, the light and the limestone play tricks on the eyes; they dazzle, sparkle and glitter on bright days. At other times the light soaks into a pale wash, merging sky and earth. Beams of bright sun pierce through the sky, spotlighting fields, walls and small enclaves of limestone. The sun, with its repeated appearances and disappearances, acts as a scene-changer. Chameleon-like, the limestone scene-shifts at the whim of the light and the weather – at once an ochreous pink, an hour later with grey and white hues, sections of hills are plunged into darkness; later a tint of purple and after another hour, a dappled sky.

  Crisp light on an invigorating March or October morning has a confident feel revealing fine details. Winter light can be deceitful – or at least deceptive – enticing you outside when you suddenly feel the coolness of the air, although it is often compensated for by a rare calm. The low-angled morning sunlight causes the fields to occasionally flash bright white in their winter garb.

  There is a dour unforgiving about the Burren at the start of the year. On a bone-chilling January day with a raw wind it can seem a place of blackness where daylight lingers for only a few hours. The tourists have disappeared but the sound of the birds has not diminished. One St Brigid’s Day (1 February) I watched a low, muffled sun – lacking in apricity – peep from behind clouds casting a long, glossy, black sheen over the pavement, walls, erratics and stones at Murroughtoohy South along the coast road. It had a dreary countenance yet there was an earthiness to it – a black-brown feel as an outburst of rain suddenly returned, then just as quickly cleared leaving a subdued mood. The wintry showers, accompanied by a concoction of snow, sleet and hail, were punctuated by brief glimpses of rainbow slashes a
dorning the sky – far from dazzling but still enough to gladden a cold winter’s heart and break the sullen atmosphere. My car clock timed the setting sun at 5.41 p.m.

  As darkness falls I walk across clumps of grass that in a few months’ time will be a riot of colours. Lurking around in the murk I look into small circular kamenitzas filled with water and find they are hardened to a consistency similar to that of crème brûlée. Delicately I tiptoe over them. With boyish curiosity I dip the top of my boot into one and shatter what turns out to be surprisingly thick ice with thin stalks of grass embedded in it. The sharp ice feels good to touch. Clumps of grass are talced with a light ground frost. I lift a large chunk then drop it on the pavement shattering the shards into small fragments.

  In my short, crunching stroll through grass I watch an active gang of hooded crows. Pied wagtails flit busily around, and glossy, black-capped bullfinches hop from wall to boulder and on to the limestone. From the branch of a bare and burnished hawthorn tree a solitary robin sings its heart out, its throat trembling with the cold. Back in town a hardened frost with a sharp sting – a rare occurrence here – sets in as car windscreens freeze over.

  The gradations of light of different times of the day carry their own weight. Golden shafts of morning light at Corcomroe Abbey lend it a special magic. Equally beguiling is to see Gragan East shrouded with a swirling chiffon of mist drifting through the valley. Midday light can be sparkling on a bright day while late-afternoon light picks up different textures. Some nights the deepening hues mean that there is no perceptible horizon. The Atlantic and the sky blend into a seamless, hazy void, occasionally the one being a mirror image of the other. Water and sky meld and it becomes impossible to distinguish the boundary between the two. There is a feeling of unbounded space. The horizon is lost. The French call this time entre chien et lupe (between the dog and the wolf). It is a period that feels both tranquil and threatening.