Burren Country

by Paul Clements

  Given these considerations and the fact that the Burren has a pleasing absence of people, it is not surprising that this solitary night creature inclined to bashfulness and with feline features has a special love for the area and thrives here. It embodies its tutelary spirit. These are the reasons why this rarely seen night voyager survives.

  I have often considered what has called me back to the Burren, why it exerts such an irresistible pull, and have tried to account for its centrality in my life. Like the pine marten, I am native to Ireland, enjoy fruit and although I have arboreal tendencies, I have no special longing to climb hazel trees, sniff bark, taste resin or live in derelict buildings. There has, though,always been a wandering streak to my life, complete with a bohemian vagrancy and a nocturnal side. I have tried to analyse my emotions and evolve my own disciplines as to why I have such a longing for the place and why I have spent a disproportionate amount of my life exploring its mysteries, banging my knees on its rock and occasionally falling into its grykes.

  Since my late teens I have been fortunate to have travelled widely, visiting five continents and two hemispheres. My honeymoon was spent on a houseboat in Kashmir overlooking the Himalayas. I have driven the Great Ocean Road in Australia, toured New England in the fall, safaried in Kenya, tramped the jungles of Indonesia, ridden white horses through the Camargue, paid homage at the Taj Mahal and sunbathed in the Caribbean. I have wandered the streets of Florence, Venice, San Francisco, Istanbul, Marrakech, Prague, Seville, Barcelona, St Petersburg (when it was Leningrad), Paris, Amsterdam and many other cities.

  The highest snowy hills of Scotland and Wales have called me to climb them. As a visiting Fellow, I have been enraptured by the honey-coloured buildings and colleges of Oxford (the view from the Radcliffe Camera has not changed in 500 years), and enjoyed the ceaseless life of London both for work and pleasure. Nearer home, I love the drumlins of my Tyrone childhood, the high peaks of Kerry and Connemara, the coastline of Donegal, the glens of Antrim and the rock art of County Meath’s historic high places. Although I revel in the anonymity of cities, being a village boy at heart I love mooching around the streets of Ireland’s small towns listening to the gossip and watching their twitching windows. I have spent time in many of them: from Kilmore Quay to Dunmore East, from Kenmare, Kinnitty and Cadamstown, through Oola and Oldcastle, Lismore and Ardmore; I have lingered in the North Tipperary duo of Coolbaun and Puckaun, have pondered in Pastimeknock (a townland in the Waterford parish of Trinity Without), waited patiently for that Effin bus, heard the dogs bark in Lattin, and misbehaved in the pubs of Carrick-on-Shannon. Most of all, though, I have been happiest whiling away the hours in Ballyvaughan.

  We all have a collection of images of a place or places that are of appeal. Each, in its own way, has at different times of my life, been special. But when I think of where I really want to be for supreme happiness, then it is pavement-pounding, tramping the hills, breathing the crystalline air, and indulging in the floristic pleasures of the grey limestone of the Burren. Like the pine marten, I have my own reasons. It is a perpetual place, a precious place, a dream place, and a dreamer’s world. It is a place that weaves an enduring spell with its sights and sounds, its solaces and silences.

  The ethereal beauty and sense of contentment found in it has often called me back. It has been indispensable to my wellbeing, cleansing the toxins and serving my spiritual needs. It has become my uttermost desideratum. (Be still, my beating heart!) The romantically inclined Welsh call it hiraeth: a longing or yearning for the homeland or for something indefinable. The Portuguese sum up this complexity of feelings in the word saudade: an ache in one’s soul, the feeling of missing something, or homesickness. The Turks too have a word for this sadness: huzun, which roughly translates as ‘melancholy.’ The American nature writer Richard Nelson puts it well:

  What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it’s flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.

  When you are in it, the outside world can seem a thousand kilometres away. After each visit, having renewed my fix of Burren bounty in my happiness hotspots, all is right with the world. When Bill Bryson was crossing the remote, flat and empty lands of South Dakota in The Lost Continent he described it as ‘the world’s first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber’. He should have come to the Burren. Almost to the point of sensorial overload, my senses are in a state of heightened awareness, my horizons widened. With a revived eye I feel I can see farther and better appreciate images, shapes and colours. I leave in a happy mental and physical state, content that I can carry around in my head an archive of personal images. Like the paying of a good compliment, the golden afterglow of these images lasts for up to six months. Its physical finery and visual memory is forever in my mind’s eye (partly owing to the fact that a framed Folding Landscapes map measuring 1.2m by 1m occupies a huge amount of wall space above my writing desk).

  What then is the prevailing spirit of this stony, hillswaddled place at the extreme edge of Europe, and how best can its intrinsic nature be captured? You will never capture the totality of it in words, photographs or paintings. You will find it hard to bottle the intoxicating nectar of the Burren for later consumption. (An entrepreneur once tried this in Cumbria and sold it in souvenir tins as Lake District Air.) The Burren nectar, which is something of an acquired taste, is extremely difficult to pin down. It is an elusive abstraction. Its essential spirit – the sui generis – will always remain intangible. The Burren holds many secrets. Interpreting its innermost inscrutable thoughts is not an easy challenge. People set out to capture it; instead it captures them. Richard Mabey describes it as a place of ‘incongruity and optical illusion … an exuberant, flirtatious landscape’. There is no doubt you could spend a lifetime flirting with the smooth limestone and not do justice to its unending mystery. Yet its essence is to be found everywhere. Catch the right day and you can feel it in the ruins of an abbey or in a walk along a green road. You can sense it in the frolic of a butterfly, the swerve of a raven, the quiver of the wind-blown mountain avens, the pungent smell of wild garlic or the straw stalactites dangling in a cave with their mesmerising silver threads of light. You can sense it in the exhilaration of the wild waves on a clint at Poll Salach, during sunset at Black Head, a walk alongside the stream at Rathborney, in the curve of a mountain, the feel of the wind coming off the Atlantic, the shape of a stark erratic, the undulating and swift flight of a redpoll, or an hour spent seawatching. You can sense it in a night of beauty with a harvest moon of silver quietness and an element of melancholy hanging in the air.

  The Burren possesses what are regarded as the five essential components for finding tranquillity in modern life: natural landscape, listening to birdsong, peace and quiet (a magnificent ‘sound’), seeing natural-looking woodland, and a clear view of the stars. The daily snapshots and minute dramas – referred to by nature writers as ‘encounters of meaning’ – live long with those who visit. Incandescent visions of things I have seen often flit across my dreams. Occasionally it is the commonplace that stirs these super-charged memories, the accumulation of intense moments. The list, with details that are burned on my retina, includes vignettes from a day-long walk in the hills, a chance meeting or wayside encounter: the dart of a hare through a sheep creep in a stone wall, the flash of sunlight on the pavement after rain, jackdaws gathering to soak up the warmth from the rock, the sight of a solitary figure dropping down the terracing, fitful sunshine lighting up the rocks and disappearing, or the flash of a passing shadow.

  For me these represent all that is best, expressing the quintessential excitement of this life-enriching place. Exploring its enigmas is what makes it special. It is a good place in which to spend time, on your own with your thoughts and dreams, or if you feel the need, in the company of others. I hav
e come and gone, staying for days, weekends, and weeks on end. I have seen the small dramas of Burren life but have missed much more by not living here. But then, I ask myself, how could I miss it, if I lived here? Many people have visions of a secret home. It could be in the desert, the Canadian prairie, on top of mountains or in the bogs, under the sea, in the Bolivian wilderness, or in the Norwegian wasteland. The tourism PR and travel articles about the Burren sell it as a ‘great wilderness’, a ‘moonscape’ or ‘lunar landscape’, but these are tired phrases.

  Whatever else it represents, the Burren is an experiment in time travel. What you find here depends on where you look and where you go. It is a rich cosmos, a place that reeks with a deep and enduring history and a charisma of its own. It has an endless capacity to surprise and inspire. When the wildlife writer Robert Macfarlane visited in 2005 with the naturalist Roger Deakin, he described it as a ‘giant necropolis’ and wrote about experiencing in a fort ‘the swift deepening of time, the sharp sense of the preterite’.

  There are manifold sides to it with disciplines of geography, geology, archaeology and botany leading the field. But the Burren, and what it represents, is more than the sum of the many ways in which it can be studied. Its spirit eludes some who come in search of it. Others return year after year to their favourite haunts, in favourite seasons, to their likes and dislikes, searching attentively in its innermost recesses. They have diverse interests, scientific and non-scientific, outdoors and indoors, underground and overground. But whatever their pursuits or their calling, they have one thing in common – an intention to find the spirit of the place and a desire to get drunk on the magic of the unique taste of their own personalised Burren wine. Burrenophilia is perhaps not as well known as Francophilia or Anglophilia but it is now a recognised, bona fide philia. Many have gained from the spirit of the Burren – not necessarily financial gain, but happiness, and for some a feeling of inamorato. The Burren requires time and inspires devotion in all who know it well. On my visits, I have followed one of the Dalai Lama’s 18 Rules for Living: ‘Once a year, go somewhere you have never been before.’

  When Martha Gellhorn fell in love with the Rift Valley in East Africa she felt as if the quality of her blood had changed:

  Something new, rich and strong is pumping through my veins and exalting my heart, my lungs are filled with sunlit air, the world is too beautiful, I might easily spread my arms and fly.

  Paragliding may be the nearest you could come to this state of mind, although I have never gone as far as jumping off the hills or trying to achieve parallel status with the fulmars or great blackbacked gulls. But I have often felt the urgent and disturbing demand of the Burren in my bloodstream.

  For several years in the 1990s local people, led by John D. MacNamara, organised an annual spring Burren Wildlife Symposium held in Ballinalacken Castle on the coast road near Doolin. They chose as their logo an image of the pine marten. This takes us back to the shy mustelid that slips sinuously and with a quiet secrecy across twilit roads. We have now a fair idea why it is particularly well adapted to life here and what it likes about the place. I cannot speak for Martes martes, but I reckon that we are in agreement in liking many of its special consolations: the potent allure of its emptiness, its roominess, its rawness, its uninhabitedness, its explorability, and its languid vastness. The theatre of nature appeals to us both. We have a joint hankering for open spaces and places to hide. I like the flowering of life in the spring, the way the sunlight spectacularly transmutes the rocks into ever-changing colours, and the constant play of light, through its shape-shifting shadows. I like the fact that it is a paean to the senses, a hymn to the pleasures of life and a place where you can taste nature at first hand. If you desire to know it, feel it, and live it, then walk its limestone, sample its silences and light, its uninterrupted horizons, and breathe the elixir of its air. Suffice to say that it exercises a power over you like nowhere else. It is an Arcadia, a place you feel at home in, after some acclimatising. Everything seems right with the world in this relaxing place. Once the Burren nirvana gets you in its vice- like grip, you are caught.

  Each visit yields a rich harvest of memories with its own dynamic and makes me look at the world anew. After each sojourn within its ambit I realise what another Burren habitué Dr Charles Nelson meant when he wrote in his seminal companion to the wildflowers that the Burren is ‘ineluctable’; there is no escape, once caught, forever smitten. Just one word sums it up. Like a disease, once experienced, it never lets you go. You are in its clutches. There is no cure. No visit to the doctor’s, no amount of apples, pills or tablets, not even climbing a hazel tree (although I have tried it) will remedy this affliction. On each visit the days slip by all too quickly and still my Itinerarium Curiousium (Itinerary of Curiosities) continues to grow. The Burren can titillate too much. I wonder why two white horses have been chalked on a rock above the road near Poulawack, about the possible meaning of the Yggdrasil tree of life symbol on the Ó Lochlainn tomb at Corcomroe Abbey, about why the fox cub was acting suspiciously on the road at Ballyconry – these questions remain to be unlocked on other trips.

  It is not possible to know a landscape exhaustively or comprehensively in all its disciplines. But each time I prepare to leave – my mind unsatiated – I point the car in the direction of home and the humdrum world of work that imprisons the spirit, I am loath to depart. A wistful and soft tristesse comes over me. I will return and in the interests of spiritual sustenance, breathe the limestone again, but part of my soul deep down remains here tied to a mystical compass point. To live here, I have concluded, would be a commitment that would eliminate the tickling of the surprise nodes that each return visit brings to somewhere that is irreplaceably and everlastingly itself.

  Wedge Tomb, Poulaphuca © Marty Johnston

  Coda

  In 2009 the American guidebook publishers Frommer’s brought out 500 Places to See Before They Disappear, a list of the world’s most endangered tourist destinations. Under the sub-heading ‘One-of-a-kind Landscapes’, the Burren was included (at No. 6) in the exalted company of the Columbia Icefields in Alberta, the Everglades in Southern Florida, the Pantanal wildlife zone in south-western Brazil, and the Purnululu National Park in Western Australia. The Burren was described as ‘Ireland’s stony wilderness … a fragile environment that is threatened by both too much and too little human attention’.

  While there is no danger of the Burren disappearing in the foreseeable future, it is clear that it does receive a huge amount of attention. A glance at the bibliography that follows shows a proliferation of books about it in the past twenty years. In 1990, apart from some local guides and an academic flora, it was hard to find any detailed reference books to it. The publication in the early 1990s of Dr Charles Nelson’s companion to the wildflowers, Gordon D’Arcy’s natural history book, and the collection of essays in The Book of the Burren brought a heightened level of interest, opening the doors to a much wider audience.

  Lest I have painted in this book too romantic a picture, everything in the clichéd Burren rock garden is not always rosy. It is often viewed, not so much through rose-tinted, but gentian-tinted, spectacles. There are enormous pressures from different quarters, and its heritage is under threat. Fortunately many highly committed and dedicated people are working to protect it.

  Irish newspapers frequently carry stories about the alarming spread of scrub threatening the archaeological monuments and destroying the habitats of plants. This has been a worrying development in recent years and plans have been put in place to get the grazing balance right. In an effort to encourage visitors to help look after the landscape, the Burren Code was drawn up in 2000 promoting good practice for tourists. Signs in three languages were erected at busy locations urging visitors not to shatter large pieces of limestone or remove stones which were being indiscriminately taken from walls.

  At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the Burren has a large number of people fighting it
s corner. It is now a much-labelled place with a heavy amount of acronymic armour-cladding and several organisations looking after its interests. Hard-working groups such as Burrenbeo, Burren Connect, Burren Way and the Burren Life Project, constantly highlight issues that need to be dealt with, and have done remarkable work in conservation and sustainability. Debates have been started and practical measures taken to help ensure the future of specific sites. Community and farming initiatives as well as campaigning by environmental groups have delivered benefits. Information, in the form of literature and on websites, is readily accessible through the Burrenbeo’s education centre in Kinvara and at tourist information points in Ballyvaughan and Kilfenora.

  But there are difficulties in funding and in raising awareness, and a holistic approach is lacking. No comprehensive landscape legislative framework is in place for Ireland. The protective labels themselves, while clearly important, will not secure the Burren’s future. The government pumps money into helping it but still does not have a coherent integrated management plan for its future and appears unwilling to come up with any sort of properly structured long-term strategy.

  In 2010 the Irish government selected the Burren as one of its tentative list of nominees to UNESCO as world heritage sites. The Office of Public Works announced that the Burren had taken over from Killarney National Park in being proposed as Ireland’s prime natural landscape and that it had met the criteria of having Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). In the same year, a survey – carried out by an insurer of heritage buildings which asked people to name their favourite Irish heritage site – showed that the Burren came out on top and was the place most people would prefer to be granted UNESCO status.