The Burren

From Adare I drove to The Burren, a region in Ireland which incorporates a national park best known for its rocks. Yes, you read that right. The area as a whole is so rocky that marauders are said to have largely passed it by, taking one look at the barren landscape and deciding that it wasn’t worth the effort of pulling their swords from their scabbards. It’s an attitude which is easy to understand when you’re on the ground, as it feels rather like a martian landscape, with mountains still showing the geologic scratches from the time, aeons ago, when glaciers pass by, and the intervening ground scattered liberally with rocky detritus.

Yet somehow, for millenia, people have scraped a living here – running their cattle on tiny pastures in the lowlands during summer, and moving them up to the mountains, whose very rockiness provides ample shelter from freezing winds in winter. It’s a method which allows each part of the land chance to lie fallow before being grazed again, and the stocky little cows, with their thick winter fur still on when I came across some in a minuscule paddock, seem to grow strong on the extraordinary variety of plants which grow in this unusual landscape – a unique combination of Mediterranean, alpine and meadow flowers and herbs thanks to the landscape itself and the influence of the Gulf stream.

That people have lived here across ages is evident across this rocky region which joins sea and mountains together – scattered everywhere are ancient stone tombs, monasteries, churches, schools, houses, all hewn from the abundant stone. 

The Burren. Cosy.