Come to Burren, the Irish region famous for otherworldly rock formations

Ireland is known as the Emerald Isle, and a popular saying goes that in its countryside you can find 40 shades of green.

Fly over the country, and you might set about counting them. There are the jade greens of the Shannon River Basin and the olive greens of the Wicklow Mountains. Spotted here and there are the racing greens of conifer forests, and bogs that are the faded green of a well-worn wax jacket. But as you reach the Atlantic coast, you can find an exception to the rule — a patch of terrain that isn’t green at all, but has the foreboding grey of an approaching storm cloud.

This is the Burren, its name derived from the Irish word ‘boíreann’, which means ‘rocky place’. Here, over some 140sq miles in the north of County Clare, that comforting quilt of green is stripped away to expose a stark region of bare limestone, also known as a karst landscape. Up close, you see the Burren isn’t a featureless expanse of limestone — rather, it’s a place where the rock wanders in beguiling patterns, with concentric swirls that look almost like the fingerprints left by a giant.

It’s a place where almost no rivers flow above ground; a place where turloughs (seasonal lakes) dry up in summer droughts and are resurrected with autumn rains. Tree cover is scarce — there’s little sanctuary from the icy jab of an inbound Atlantic gale. It gives the place a singular, sullen beauty, with the bones of the land laid bare. JRR Tolkien travelled here, and it’s locally claimed the Burren was a template for Middle-earth. The locals never specify exactly which part it inspired, though — in sunshine, it’s as fantastical as Hobbiton; in bad weather, as severe as Mordor.

The living rock

I arrive in the Burren on a cloudy day, when the sky, sea and land are all rendered in shades of charcoal and grey. I get my bearings by driving along the coast road, between rolling karst hills and a roiling sea crested by white rags. Bare limestone rises from the shore, like the battlements of a citadel. Gulls wheel about the Black Head lighthouse, clinging to a lonely cape. The waves of Galway Bay break unrelentingly against the rock.

It’s in the ocean that the story of the Burren begins. Some 325 million years ago, Ireland lay close to the Equator, and marine organisms compacted to form sedimentary rock under a tropical sea of honeymoon blue. Aeons later, two accomplices conspired to bring that limestone up to the surface. First came the glaciers, their icy claws raking at the landscape, stripping away the sand and mud under which the limestone had long lain entombed. Second came humans. Neolithic farmers chopped down the forests that clung to the shallow soil of the Burren — until, with no roots to hold them, the clods of earth dispersed and the limestone finally became exposed.

Today, the Burren is a stop on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, a 1,600-mile touring route stretching along the west coast. Visitors park up to hike its trails or to simply soak up the view, taken aback by this alien interlude on otherwise green shores. To many, it seems as lifeless as a quarry, but, if you know where to look, there are signs of life everywhere: in the fossils of corals, sea urchins and ammonites, buried for millions of years and now warmed by (occasional) Irish sunshine; and in the imprints left over the millennia by humans, who built monuments from pieces of the karst. The road swerves inland from the lighthouse and soon, rising over the brow of the hill, one such monument appears: the Caherconnell Stone Fort, an early medieval structure roughly resembling a donut in its layout.

“Chances are, if you dropped a bone here some 4,000 years ago, we could still find it today,” says Dr Michelle Comber, a researcher at the University of Galway. “The topography has preserved so much.” Michelle is supervising the first day of an archaeological dig at the fort; students grimace in sideways rain while she and I chat in a gazebo that the wind is trying to prize off its pegs.

Peeking out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, Michelle explains that the Caherconnell Stone Fort was occupied between the 10th and the 16th centuries, its 10ft-thick walls providing shelter from both enemies and the elements. She adds that the Burren is a particular hotspot for ring forts: there are roughly three every 1sq km. Driving around, I learn to spot them: most have overgrown battlements, with mosses serving as mortar for old stones. From above, their ring-shaped outline is sometimes only just discernible, like a faint stain left by a mug of coffee.

They are echoes of a time when the Burren was densely populated, thanks to its strategic position beside Galway Bay. The region remained a redoubt of Gaelic culture as British influence spread westward through Ireland. Leading Cromwell’s forces against guerillas in the 1650s, Edmund Ludlow famously remarked the Burren was ‘a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him’. Pride in this rock lives on.

“When the Englishman came to Ireland, he looked at all this rocky land and said — you can keep it!” says John Davoren, leaning on his shepherd’s crook, when I meet him later that afternoon. “And here we still are farming.”

John’s family owns the land around Caherconnell Stone Fort, and they stage sheepdog demonstrations for visitors next to its battlements. I watch as his four dogs — Jill, Lynn, Rose and Jess — choreograph a flock of sheep around a series of obstacles. John’s intricate medley of whistles rings out through the wet afternoon air like a secret language. It looks effortless, but it’s a craft honed over a lifetime. He explains that, for all but the first dozen or so of his 70 years, he has trained dogs to work on the high limestone hills. “It can be wild up there and the wind can chop you down,” he says. “But I like it very well. On a good day, the sunlight hops off the rock.”

The farmers of the Burren have thrived for generations by following a unique practice. In mountainous parts of the world, flocks are moved from high pastures to more sheltered lowlands for winter, a process known as transhumance. The Burren, however, has a culture of ‘reverse transhumance’, which sees farmers take their stock up to the hills for grazing from September until April. This, again, is a product of geology — limestone stores heat through summer and releases it during the colder days, making for a milder environment. In the porous hills that are devoid of water in the summer months, drinking holes spring up as the water table rises.

But, most significantly, it’s the summer wildflowers that bloom among the karst that sustain the herds. As I climb Mullaghmore — one of the highest peaks in the Burren, rising a few miles east of Caherconnell — in search of these herds, the sun reemerges. The tip of my walking stick clinks against the rock and passing clouds cast islands of shadow onto the limestone. I clamber higher and the birdsong of the valley below fades away. The ground underfoot is almost like a jigsaw: there are the large stone pieces, called clints, and, between them, the gaps, known as grikes. When I lie down on a clint and peer into a grike, it’s like looking down into a tiny, jungly canyon — a secret vein of life. Within the grikes grow gentians and milkwort, lady’s bedstraw and burnet roses — a dizzying mix of Arctic-Alpine and Mediterranean flora. Rare orchids also flower in these little fissures.

My descent of Mullaghmore is slow and deliberate. The grikes are places of extraordinary biodiversity, but they’re perilous to walkers — the cause of a thousand broken ankles. Crossing the karst entails hopping gingerly between the slabs, as though they’re stepping stones over a river. It’s less like walking, more like dancing with the rock.

The holy rock

“The trick is to move quickly” says my guide, Cyril O’Flaithearta, as I meet him on the ferry dock at Inishmore, and head out onto the karst. “Rocks can be alive, and shift underfoot. People look at me skipping on the karst and say ‘Jesus Mary and Joseph, he’s going off at quite a pace, isn’t he?’ But that’s how you go here; you don’t hang around. It becomes instinctive.”

Cyril is a resident of another karst landscape — the Aran Islands, visible from the high summits of the Burren. Its three main islands are reached by a 30-minute ferry ride from the mainland, a rough crossing during which I watch some passengers turn the same shade of green as their souvenir Ireland baseball caps.

Roughly 1,250 islanders live on the archipelago. Eavesdrop on their conversations and you’ll likely hear the Irish language rather than the English of most of the mainland. But the landscape speaks the same geological language as the Burren — it could be a stray chunk of it that has slipped out to sea.

Cyril drives me along narrow country lanes, passing crofters’ cottages and fields fertilised by seaweed gathered from the shore. It looks familiar; indeed, the island was a filming location for the 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin. We park up to peer over cliffs that drop into raging Atlantic swells.

Cyril knows the textures and tendencies of the karst. Last winter, he built over a mile of dry-stone wall for the family farm — an effort he describes as “good for the Christmas turkey belly”.

“Building a dry-stone wall is like a game of Jenga,” he says. “But it’s hard work. You look at the things our ancestors built from this same stone and think, ‘Bloody hell, they must have been made of something else.’”

The Aran Islands are lacking in firewood, fresh water and farmland, but they suffer no such lack of rock. Much of it was used to build churches at a time when Ireland’s Atlantic coast was a cradle of early Christianity. On Inishmore, the largest of the islands, there’s the sixth-century St Enda’s Monastery: a little ruin submerged in the marram grass among a thicket of Celtic crosses, next to the grassy runway of the airport. There are also the ‘seven churches’, an ancient pilgrimage complex whose buildings are now roofed only by the sky. Cyril shows me the vast blocks used in the construction of Teampall Mac Duach, a pretty little church set in a little glade by a white sand beach. “It’s almost like the builders hauled about these big stones as a way of showing their faith,” he says. “Big slabs of rock might have been their way of saying ‘God is Great’.”

Rock of ages

The Burren is home to two world-famous Irish landmarks. The first, hidden beneath a great karst cliff, is a grey building in a field of dandelions, marked on maps as Glanquin Farmhouse. A sign outside advises passers-by that this is a working farm and sternly warns against unauthorised access to what is familiar to many as Parochial House — the home of the three priests in the sitcom Father Ted. You are, by contrast, welcome to stop by the second landmark, Poulnabrone Dolmen, a megalithic structure dating back at least 5,800 years, making it very roughly contemporary with Stonehenge. It represents an opening chapter in Ireland’s national story. A picture of it watches over departures at Dublin Airport.

On my last evening in Ireland, I stride across the fields to Poulnabrone Dolmen as a cuckoo calls out from a nearby copse. A gentle breeze sways the stems of oxeye daisies, and the upright flagstones of the dolmen neatly frame the setting sun. Poulnabrone Dolmen was built around the time the Burren was deforested by those first Neolithic farmers — it stands at the genesis of this landscape. It’s classified as a ‘portal tomb’ because of its door-like design, but at certain times, such as when the tour buses have departed and the swifts glide about the ancient stones, it seems like a portal to another time — or another life.

The precise function of Poulnabrone Dolmen is lost in the fog of prehistory. It was, perhaps, a shrine or a monument for those farmers seeking to claim their territory. It was also a burial place; in the 1980s, archaeologists unearthed remains of 33 people — men and women, old and young, their bones laid beneath karst flagstones. Analysis of their bones revealed the tomb had been in continual use between 3800 BCE and 3200 BCE.

At Caherconnell Stone Fort, the karst was used to create a residence for the living; on the Aran Islands, stones were used to create an abode of god. But Poulnabrone Dolmen was a house for the dead — an instance of that instinct to memorialise lost lives by erecting rock.

All across the Burren, you can find examples of people making a mark on the rock. Karst is obliging for vandals who wish to carve names and initials into it. Modern tourists heap stones into cairns when they reach the summits of the Burren, much to the fury of locals, who disagree with this reshaping of an ancient landscape. And, not far from Poulnabrone Dolmen, I find older heaps of stones deposited by medieval pilgrims visiting a holy well devoted to St Columcille, one of Ireland’s patron saints. Journeys to the sacred waters were recorded by dropping a single stone about the size of a fist — it’s said pilgrims absolve themselves of sin by making circuits around the heap before drinking from the well. Today, in an increasingly secular Ireland, St Columcille’s well is little visited. It’s set in a green landscape beneath the peaks of the Burren, at the end of a country lane. A hawthorn tree hangs over it; a slab of rock beside it is engraved with a fading cross. I see no one else during my visit, and the only sound is that of the water bubbling up from beneath the karst.

But just beyond the southern boundary of the Burren, beside the shale and sandstone heights of the Cliffs of Moher, is a far more frequented holy well, devoted to another of Ireland’s patron saints, St Brigid. Perhaps because the well stands beside a major road, pilgrims continue to come to this little grotto. St Brigid is said to have worked miracle cures, and there are written prayers beside yellowing portraits of the sick. Figurines of Jesus, Mary and angels stand among notes to people who already passed into the next life, entrusted to Brigid for safekeeping and left to wither in the humid air. I stand, listening to the rush of the spring, the swish of passing traffic and the bellow of the wind outside, making landfall from the Atlantic onto the skeletal hills of the Burren.

Many stones have been placed by the well. Most are limestone and, upon one piece, someone has painted a little red heart.