The problem with writing about the Burren is that there’s no consensus about where it is. Different people have different ideas. On my first trip there, I plaintively asked a girl in a café in Kilfenora, whose heyday was probably the 11th century (Kilfenora, that is, not the café) where the Burren was and she jerked her thumb towards the door. ‘Out there,’ she said. And so I made my way down the road to the nearest field to contemplate the celebrated flora. With beginner’s luck, I saw, for the first and last time, a curious little red frog. A few minutes later I came across the wild orchids for which the place is famous — as luck would have it, I was there in June, the best time for flowers. But then I found out that for geologists, Kilfenora isn’t strictly the Burren at all.
Just make for north Clare. If you head up from Corofin and stop at Ballyvaughan, where Steven Spielberg eats cheesecake in the tearooms, or go west to Doolin and stop at the Atlantic, you’re there. But the where is less important than the why. Why go? Well, it depends what you’re after. There are at least half a dozen facets of the place which make it worth a visit.
For geologists it’s the extraordinary rock formation — Burren means in Irish a place of rocks — ‘sculptured into flat, bare terraces, criss-crossed by joints, each terrace abruptly separated from the next by a cliff, so that the whole landscape looks like a fantastic series of stairs’, according to one environmentalist. Then there’s the famous flora, an extraordinary assortment of plants that would normally be described as arctic, alpine or Mediterranean, flourishing in a single unlikely terrain.
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