Eco Adventure: Ireland's Burren

As Ireland's west coast meadows fill with holiday cottages, tread carefully through the Burren's weirdly beautiful ecology and tragic past toward an eco-savvy future.

Ireland's western cliffs shoot straight out of a teal North Atlantic. It's beautiful, but everybody knows it. Coastal towns here may have been spoiled by the crush of tourism, but 30 minutes inland, the Burren plateau is at this time blissfully free of sea-side throngs, and instead teems with wild beauty, a long-distance path, a pleasant self-catering hostel, and a perfumery. Here's how to see it carefully:

Getting There

"Burren", from the Gaelic "An Boireann" means "a place of stone". A stoney place indeed as, 45 minutes northwest from Shannon Airport, the vast limestone plateau sweeps up from behind the pastel villages of Kilnaboy and Corofin like a fossilized tidal wave. There is no bus service into the Burren. Most people travel by car, although bus routes are planned. Biking is a challenge - the roads are narrow and steep, and the wind relentless - but it's not impossible. See Bike Hire Ireland at 8 euros/day in Galway, and the pricier Irish Cycle Hire for longer hires out of Ennis near Shannon.

The Burren Way and Carron

Or they walk. The Burren Way, western Ireland's 26-mile waymarked long-distance walking path, follows old green roads and famine roads. The Burren Way crosses Carron village, a comfortable base from which to launch day walks or make an inn-to-inn ramble stop.

The little town of Carron, from "cairn" which means "a pile of rocks", is made up of four houses, a hostel, a church, and the little stone house - now a museum, nearly a shrine - where Michael Cusak, the hero-founder of Ireland's Gaelic Athletic Association, that championed the national sport craze, hurling, was born in 1841. Next door is a pub called The Cassidy. The hostel rents bikes. All of Carron looks west down the hill, and across Carron Turlogh, full of birds, to the gun-metal grey bulk of Slieve Carron 3 km away. At night, the only light for miles streams from the church and the pub. The sky views are tremendous.

What to Bring

A map: It's cheaper to buy a comprehensive map before you go. The Ireland West OS map identifies ancient monument sites, graveyards, cillin (defined by as "a site for the disposal of unconsecrated burials, particularly of children"), and Bronze Age monoliths, tombs, and ring forts. Romantic, sad, interesting, these sites are often just a raised place in a field or a collapsed wall on an empty hill, some like, Poulnabron, a Burren megalithic portal tomb, are painstakingly preserved.

Rain gear: It rains all year in the Burren. Between rain showers it's sunny and windy. A Jacket Packet in a pouch, and gaters are easy to carry. A mix of trail and lane walking make light weight, ankle-supporting hiking boots preferable to trail runners, wellies, or trainers.

A compass is nice to have off road, but you're never far from a house in western Ireland.

Groceries and snacks if you're self-catering, there are no shops, although there is a pub in Carron.

Carron, The Center of Burren Ecology: It Rocks and Blossoms

The Burren climate is described as maritime temperate - steady rain dissolves the karst limestone sending it bubbling down into the earth into vast and unknown rivers not far underfoot, sometimes bubbling up suddenly as turloughs - lakes that can fill a valley in a few hours. It was Carron's turlough that made geologists begin thinking about how all turlough systems work. Just outside of Carron, the Univeristy of Ireland studies Burren ecology and tries to balance land, cattle, wild goats, and people sustainably from a small research station. Its dorms are lettable to school groups.

In the sun, the limestone looks like an ice sheet breaking up. Shaggy cattle scrape out a living on the grass tufts between limestone blocks called "clints". Between the clints are rather warm and damp crevasses, called "grikes". They are their own ecosystem where blue gentians, a plant usually found in the Alps, jostles with Mediterranean ferns and mosses. The entire limestone plateau acts like a giant storage heater: sucking up a summer's worth of heat and radiating it back warming the cattle and gentians and ferns all winter. Wildflowers begin blooming in April and roar along all summer.

Capturing the essence of the Burren, The Burren Perfumery is 2 km south of Carron in a cluster of stone cottages with blue doors hidden in a grove of hazel and blackthorn. All made of the same sliver rock, the perfumery's little houses blend into the huge slieve towering above them with a ruined castle collapsing on its flank. You almost wouldn't know they were there, but out among the clints and cows, there are beehives kept warm by the stone, waiting for April when the first orchids begin to bloom. The Perfumery collects Burren blossoms, bark, herbs, leaves, and mosses all summer, distills them in their pretty stone cottages and decants them into perfumes, soaps, and lotions. It's like a little limestone and ivy chunk of the Languedoc, the picturesque cafe offers just-baked cinnamon cakes, tea, and lavender scones that you can eat sitting in the sun at little wire tables among the fennel, mint, and sage.

How to Get to Carron: 45 minutes from Shannon Airport first on a new highway, then winding lanes. Buses are few and infrequent to Kilnaboy and Carofin, making them seviceable Burren-jumping-off points.

Difficult, but not impossible to bike: read Eric Newby's Round Ireland in Low Gear.

Walking the Burren Way: Inn-to-Inn walks along the Burren Way can be mapped by you or one of many hiking companies.

Where to Stay: Clare's Rock Hostel, it gets its name from Poulnabrone, is clean and serviceable with a well-equipped communal kitchen, has a view over Carron Turlough, and a enthusiastic and friendly dog. The caretaker encourages visits to his farm nearby.

Eat and Drink: Cassidy's Pub serves food all day. Rates: Private Rooms for 2 people, from 22 euros for a double for two, to family rates.

Around the Burren: Liz Kirchner. Permission to republish Eco Adventure: Ireland's Burren must be granted by the author in writing.