The Burren: An Irish Moonscape

The Burren is a national park in western Ireland near Galway. It is nothing like the rolling green coastal hills we all associate with Ireland(those will be a subject of a later post). Instead, when I traveled there as part of my Irish road trip last year, I found a stark landscape paved with cracked limestone and dominated by ancient stone walls and naturally terraced limestone hills. It is a uniquely beautiful place.

This is a land both barren and lush. As Edmund Ludlow stated while fighting there in 1651, "(The Burren) is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him...... and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing."

Despite the harsh landscape, The Burren has been inhabited for 6000 years and many of the existing walls and structures are 1500 to even 5000 years old.

There are still local farmers that use The Burren for cattle grazing.

Beautiful stone walls built simply by picking up and stacking the abundant limestone slabs.

Cow!

A section of The Burren not picked clean of its natural cracked limestone paving.

 I imagine this view would have looked much the same 400 years ago.

Thank you to the many guidebooks that recommended this UNESCO world heritage nominated site in Ireland. Without researching ahead these are the parts of a country easily missed.