The Burren is a most un-Irish place. There are no bogs and few pastures, but clean, cracked pavement slabs of limestone, huge boulders and strangely distorted strata. Cromwell’s general, Ludlow, dismissed the area as a land ‘yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him’.
This bleak environment is, however, one of Europe’s richest botanical areas, with 1100 species of plants out of the 1400 in Ireland as a whole. It is extraordinarily beautiful, with it’s softly rounded whalebacks of light grey rock dappled by cloud shows and patches of yellow, magenta and blue flowers.
The geography: Limestone, which formed from the shells of sea creatures at the bottom of shallow seas 300 million years ago, underlies most of Ireland, yet only here, in the Burren (whose Irish name Boireann means ‘the rock’) were 500 sq miles of it scraped clean of topsoil by glaciers, some 15,000 years ago. Water quickly percolates through the limestone to the underground streams, leaving the surface dry. Only one river, the Caher, runs overland, running out to sea at Fanore. The few lakes or grassy hollows, which can reach over several acres, are fed from below and can suddenly vanish when the water table sinks. They are called ‘turloughs’. Beneath the surface, running waters have turned the rock into a maze of caves, still being mapped by potholers.
The plantlife: The surface of the Burren is far from a desert. Limestone loving plants such as foxgloves and rock roses grow there, and the rock’s microclimates also nurture plants normally at home much further north and south. Alpine plants such as mountain avens thrive there, while the warmth stored in the rock through the winter supports Mediterranean plants, such as maidenhair ferns and the bloody cranesbill. Gnarled blackthorn and junipers struggle up from the ‘grikes’, or joints in the limestone pavements, where they can find protection from the battering Atlantic winds. They grow only a few inches high.
The rock’s stored heat allows grass to grow all the year round, providing food for the feral goats that live there. The Burren also has a reverse temperature curve, which means it’s hillsides are warmer in winter than the valleys. Cattle are therefore moved to the uplands to graze in the winter.