The Burren

Top Mullach Mor August

A view taken from the top of Mullach Mor showing limestone outcrop interspersed with fields and trees.

Carsten Krieger

Top Mullach Mor August
Carsten Krieger

Top Mullach Mor August

A view taken from the top of Mullach Mor showing limestone outcrop interspersed with fields and trees.

Carsten Krieger

Enlarge image

Ireland's most distinctive and internationally celebrated landscape, the Burren of County Clare, owes much to human activity both in prehistoric and modern times. But the original sculpting of its limestone hills into terraces of fissured 'pavement', into hollows the size of valleys or of egg-cups, or into underground caverns and passages as intricate as a sponge, was the work of water and ice over millions of years. Like other 'karst' uplands of Europe (to use the geological term for such eroded limestone), the Burren was once forested with pine. Clearance of the trees, intensive human settlement, and overgrazing of the thin, dry grassland saw much of the soil vanish down the cracks, and erosion of the limestone resume.

Today, cattle are again the key - but to conservation of a landscape that is prized by geologists, botanists and tourists alike. A tradition of winter grazing of the uplands keeps the grasses from smothering the spring and summer growth of the Burren's astonishing and exquisite array of plants.

Burren Pavement

The grey limestone pavement of the Burren with its characteristic karstic feature of clints and grikes. Grikes are the deeply eroded gullies of the limestone, which provide a home to a wide range of plants from ferns to flowers. Clints are the higher block like structures of the limestone. The surface of the limestone is not completely smooth. This has been caused by weathering of the limestone by the wind, rain and sea since the last ice age, creating small depressions in the surface of the limestone. Limestone was created under a warm tropical sea teeming with small, shelled creatures approximately 370 million years ago. As these creatures died their remains fell to the bottom of the shallow sea, to be compressed over millions of years, by their own weight and masses of sea water. Today these sea creatures provide us with one of the most spectacular landscapes in the word.

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Burren Pavement
With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Burren Pavement

The grey limestone pavement of the Burren with its characteristic karstic feature of clints and grikes. Grikes are the deeply eroded gullies of the limestone, which provide a home to a wide range of plants from ferns to flowers. Clints are the higher block like structures of the limestone. The surface of the limestone is not completely smooth. This has been caused by weathering of the limestone by the wind, rain and sea since the last ice age, creating small depressions in the surface of the limestone. Limestone was created under a warm tropical sea teeming with small, shelled creatures approximately 370 million years ago. As these creatures died their remains fell to the bottom of the shallow sea, to be compressed over millions of years, by their own weight and masses of sea water. Today these sea creatures provide us with one of the most spectacular landscapes in the word.

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Enlarge image

The floral excitement of the Burren begins in May, with the flowering of whole slopes of mountain avens in sheets of cream and gold. This is an Arctic-alpine plant, typical of valleys in northern Greenland. Nowhere else in north-west Europe does it grow so profusely as in the Burren, from hill-top down to sea-level. And pushing between its leaves, here and there, is the creamy-green flower spike of the dense-flowered orchid, Neotinea maculata, a southern plant far more at home beside the Mediterranean or in the Canary Islands. Nowhere else in the world can such a conjunction of plants be seen, some typical of arctic conditions, others of subtropical habitats, and the enigma of its origins has challenged generations of botanists and geographers.

The spectacular blossoming of mountain avens is almost equalled by the sudden brilliance underfoot, between mid-April and mid-June, of the blue stars of spring gentian - blooming, again, from the summits to the sea. This vivid flower, evoking the meadows of the Swiss Alps, is also found in Ireland on the Aran Islands and on the shores of limestone lakes in Galway and south Mayo, but the Burren remains its most celebrated stronghold.

The Burren's orchids - 22 species, at least - flower to a calendar that begins in late April and continues into September. These lovely plants, too, have their mysteries in the timing of growth and flowering, and in their mutual relationships with underground fungi. The fragrant orchid and bee orchid are two species notorious for appearing in hundreds or thousands in some years and meagre dozens in others.

Fragrant Orchid

English Name: Fragrant orchid Botanical Name (Latin): Gymnadenia conopsea Irish Name: Lus taghla Order: MONOCOTYLEDONES Family: ORCHIDACEAE Brief Description: Perennial herb, to 0.4m tall; with 3?5 leaves at base, 2?3 smaller ones on stem; inflorescence cylindrical, densely packed with rose-pink to mauve (rarely white) flowers; lateral sepals spreading, so flowers are wider than tall; fragrant.

Carsten Krieger

Fragrant Orchid
Carsten Krieger

Fragrant Orchid

English Name: Fragrant orchid Botanical Name (Latin): Gymnadenia conopsea Irish Name: Lus taghla Order: MONOCOTYLEDONES Family: ORCHIDACEAE Brief Description: Perennial herb, to 0.4m tall; with 3?5 leaves at base, 2?3 smaller ones on stem; inflorescence cylindrical, densely packed with rose-pink to mauve (rarely white) flowers; lateral sepals spreading, so flowers are wider than tall; fragrant.

Carsten Krieger

Enlarge image

As a largely undisturbed wilderness of limestone - warm, dry, full of caves and holes - the Burren has provided a natural refuge for one of Ireland's shyest predatory mammals, the pine marten. As the Irish name cat crainn, suggests, this is primarily a creature of woodland, but for decades in which persecution and farm poisons threatened its survival in the wider countryside, the cliffs and copses of the Burren became a last stronghold. Since farm poisons such as strychnine were banned, the marten has been spreading out again, helped by conifer forestry and more tolerant rural attitudes. Farmyard poultry that were once among the animal's prey have greatly declined, but the marten's diet is omnivorous. It is still led by birds and their eggs, and small mammals (including squirrels), but also extends to lizards, insects, hazel nuts and blackberries.