Walking the Burren Way, Ireland

The Burren Way in Ireland is a 125-kilometre walking route from Lahinch on the wild west coast of County Clare. It follows ancient droving tracks, greenways and county byways through the heartland of the Burren to Corofin village. A five-day walk across the largest karst limestone landscape in Europe. It’s an immersion in Irish history and culture and an exploration of natural and archaeological riches including neolithic tombs, ring forts, early medieval castles and ancient centres of learning.

Burren comes from the Irish word, Boireann, a ‘rocky place’, a landscape of bare hills and lowlands. A tilted, folded, glaciated land of limestone pavements, hazel scrub, deciduous woodland, rare wildflowers, lakes, turloughs, springs, fens and grasslands. Its cliffs, escarpments and twisted hills are pale grey. On days when the sea and the sky have a shifting soft paleness, the landscape is more ethereal than existent. A subtle and abiding beauty.

Lahinch to Doolan (27 km)

The gentle cooing of doves. Wandering the wild Atlantic coast along the far western rim of Europe. The day warm and full of promise. The air exhilarating with the scent of salt and seaweed. We breathe deeply and slowly. Happy to be here and nowhere else.

White horses in the bright green fields high above the hazy blue sea. Magenta foxgloves, crimson fuschias and yellow irises growing luxuriantly by the track. Wild strawberries for the picking. Rooks circling above enclosures where the grass has been cut and raked.

Green hedgerows make a sanctuary of the narrow back roads we walk once we cross O’Brien’s bridge and leave the Atlantic shoreline for a time. Through rural County Clare, past farms where well-fed, caramel coloured cattle graze. 

At first, the trail markers are as scant as the stories known by the locals about the Burren Way until we wind our way back to the coast, through a gentle landscape of green fields enclosed by dry stone walls that run down to the sea. An unexpected coffee at a charming artist’s studio near the village of Clahane where we sit in the sun and breathe in the green Clare landscape. A mother’s birthplace. The land from which our ancestors came. A heartland.

The fabled Cliffs of Moher. Hags Head, beautiful and dusky and dramatic. Seaspray and thousands of seabirds flying in and out of sea caves and whirling above the 200 metre high cliffs. Kyar, kyar, kyar they call. The sea here often roars and pounds the cliffs but not today. Today it is calm and cerulean blue. The cliffs a sea darkened, wind-eroded, moss-covered mass. Nesting seabirds; guillemots, razorbills, land-fearing kittiwakes and puffins with bright orange feet and startling orange and yellow striped beaks. A swell of people at the visitor’s centre then the wave subsiding as we walk on towards Doolan. A young woman walking the dirt track in her smart city clothes and oversized handbag stalls when the trail takes us over a stile and across a field that is home to an inquisitive bull.

A portal tomb and the ruins of round towers and castles. Doonagore Castle, Ballinalacken Castle and the 12th-century castle at Liscannor, built by the O’Connors and later an O’Brien stronghold. In 1588 Sir Turlough O’Brien is reputed to have presided over the mass execution of 300 survivors of the retreating Spanish Armada, shipwrecked in wild gales just off the coast.

Off in the hazy distance the Aran Islands and the mountains of Connemara. All afternoon, islands and the sea. The sun shining. The breeze warm. A long day’s walk and all of it a pleasure.

Doolan is renowned for its craic and its traditional music but we are well asleep before the musicians warm-up at 10 pm. Sleeping the deep sleep of the well-walked, dreaming of saturated green grass, pale blue seas, black roads and skies washed of colour by the sun.

Doolan to Fanore (25 km)

Stepping out into a cloudy morning with a forecast of clearing showers. A hare running across the road in front of us. Swallows courting mid-flight. Following the main road for a time, the cars slow and their drivers courteous. The faces behind the steering wheels strangely familiar, like people who we might have grown up with. The voices of unseen farmworkers drifting across the fields. The wind through the hollow steel gates like an orchestra tuning up. Young red-haired girls playing contently on this long midsummer weekend.

Rounding a bend the sea is suddenly ours again. The mountains just visible through the sea haze. The lighthouse on the tip of Inis Oirr, the smallest and closest of the Aran Islands, a shimmering white beacon. The ruin of a 16th-century stone castle, only its square tower still standing.

Lunch at the Roadside Inn in Lisdoonvarna. Delicious, locally-smoked salmon and beer infused with herbs collected on the Burren. Lisdoonvarna is home to the last matchmakers of Ireland and its houses are named after saints; St Martin, St Edna, St Anthony. Hosts farewell you with a ‘go well and God bless you’.

From Lisdoonvarna we take the winding forest road, past homes and farms abandoned during successive waves of immigration that robbed Ireland of its people and deepened its melancholy. Few famine houses remain; people in the Burren were often so poor their dwellings were made of mud and have become part of the earth again. This area was amongst the most severely affected by the Great Hunger, the Irish Potato Famine of 1845 – 1849, that saw a million people die of starvation and disease and a million more emigrate. Ireland’s population plummeted from over 8 million people to just over 6 million, a loss that it has never recovered from.

On to an ancient greenway, the limestone revealing itself in the landscape. Millions of years ago this was a tropical sea and the limestone is made up of fragments of fossilised coral and shellfish. It’s rough and wild here, the land crisscrossed with lichen stained dry stone walls and overgrown with bramble. Some of the existing stone walls are hundreds of years old and it is said there are remnants of walls dating back 6,000 years to the Neolithic period.

Pied wagtails out searching for food. The road largely deserted except for the occasional gentleman farmer and three ramblers uncertain of where they are. Even on this, the most benign of days, you can sense how bleak the winters would be and how the wind might rage.

Up on to the plateau and under Slieve Elva, the highest point on the Burren, with its shale slopes extending down to meet limestone pavements and the golden sand of Fanore Beach.

An early dinner at O’Donohue’s pub; briny oysters, homemade soda bread and a half-pint of Guinness. Women and men ordering pots of tea in the front bar as they do all over Ireland, even in the hippest city bars.

A final three-kilometre walk along the shore to our home for the evening, a room with a view out across the sea to the Aran Islands. Lights twinkling, the lighthouse on Inis Oírr flashing, the sea silver on this the longest of summer solstice nights.

Fanore to Ballyvaughan (25 km)

‘Sure if it weren’t raining you wouldn’t be knowing you’re in Ireland.’

The Aran Islands lost in the mist. The sea inky. Seabirds diving for fish. The rain coming down. The sweet earthy smell of peat being burnt. Grottos sheltering virgins and sacred hearts. Following the coast road, empty of traffic until the Sunday mass crowd starts moving. The golden sand of Fanore damp now. The Caher River, the only river in the Burren that flows completely overground, emptying into the sea.

The rain that falls on the Burren largely falls through the deep fissures in the limestone and flows underground as rivers and streams, forming caves and waterfalls and draining through springs. A lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, he of great violence and little mercy, said of the Burren ‘it is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.’

Past the unmarked graveyard of unbaptised children and on to an ancient greenway, still used to drive cattle to the uplands in winter and back down again in summer; the reverse to the movement of flocks in most of Europe. In winter the lowlands are often waterlogged or covered by turloughs (seasonal lakes) but in the uplands, after winter rain, springs occur and the earth, warmed by heat stored in the limestone over summer, supports enough growth for stock to graze throughout the winter.

Around and up and over Black Head. Conical hills of grey shale sloping down to the sea. An amphitheatre sculptured in the past by great sheets of ice. Ring forts off in the distance. One of them, Cathair an Ard Dorais, has remnants of both a chapel and a shebeen (an illicit distillery and bar).

Turning east into even wilder weather before descending down to the coast. Views across to Galway City. Marshlands, the ruins of a castle, stone walls enclosing luxuriant green fields. Uphill again on a well-trod way, an old Mass path, over a stone stile and then a steep ascent up to Gleninagh Pass. Mist, low clouds and sweeping views out over rough-overgrown land to the stonewalled enclosures of the lush Feenagh Valley. On the plateau, the grykes (fissures) of the limestone pavement are a mass of wildflowers; orchids, mountain avens, bloody cranesbills and ferns. Alpine, Arctic and Mediterranean plants growing together; a rare and beautiful wild garden, even in the rain.

Around the shoulder of Cappanawalla Mountain before descending into greenness. Following tree-lined country byways, through verdant green woods with their Tolkien-like ferns and moss-covered trees and on to Ballyvaughan. The persistent rain keeps us walking with barely a break all day and we arrive in town bedraggled and a little spent. The charming O’Lochlainn whiskey bar and a soothing shot of one of Ireland’s best 12-year-old whiskeys work their magic and we wander contentedly out into the fading light.

Ballyvaughan to Carran (25 km)

Water still lying about but no rain falling and the sky lifting. The day still and full of birdsong. A stroll to Ballyvaughan pier, past estuarine habitats and whitewashed, thatched-roofed cottages. Ballyvaughan was a thriving port in the 19th century, in the heyday of the herring fishing boom. Turf boats from Connemara crossed Galway Bay laden with peat for this treeless barony and grain, meat and vegetables from the Burren were exported from here.

Back into the green woods, now grazed by black-faced sheep. We walk a short stretch of the way with an American woman, ‘Laurie, originally from Dallas, now living in Minnesota.’ She’s here for a week-long writers’ retreat. We stop at the tower house that is Newton Castle, a circular tower on a square base, built in the 16th century by the O’Briens and now part of the Burren School of Art. The school has a philosophy of enabling creative people from around the world to immerse themselves in the landscape and community of the Burren and contribute to the tradition of learning established by the Brehon and Bardic schools of the 6th century. The Bards, professors of literature and letters, memorised and preserved the history and tradition of clan and country in poems and songs. Foreign visitors of the time commented that the Irish ‘were intoxicated by the power of words.’

Down country lanes, past the ruins of churches, forgotten graveyards and rusted ‘bull in field’ signs, the Clare way of saying ‘keep out’. A fallen neolithic portal tomb. The remnants of an early Christian ring fort. A holy well, one of over 40 in the Burren. These holy wells have a tradition of reverence going back to pagan times. With the coming of Christianity in the 5th century, they were adapted for Christian worship. Generally associated with a local saint, holy wells are still visited as places of pilgrimage and healing. They often have a holy rock or tree (hawthorn, ash or oak) strung with votive offerings. 

Building humidity. Up higher, in the very heart of the Burren, we are in a world of stepped, elliptical hills of pale grey limestone and pavements of even paler grey clints (paving stones) and grykes (fissures), beautiful with their gardens of intensely blue gentians, creamy white burnet roses and bright green ferns. Higher up still, where there is soil, there are meadows of wildflowers and spring grasses. There’s no one else about. The landscape holds the knowledge of thousands of years of history and culture and we have it to ourselves.

Peat still being cut and laid out to dry. Walking the bog road walked by peat cutters for centuries. With the scarcity of trees in the Burren, turf rights to the wet, spongy, blanket bogs of these uplands were hard fought for and tightly held.

The long sustained call of a bird, perhaps a hoopoe that has strayed off course and made landfall on the Irish coast. Along narrow roads, past farms and the stone fort of Cathair Mhic Neachtain. The fort was built sometime in the early Medieval period (1st century) as the defended farmstead of a wealthy landowner. In the 17th century, it was the home of a famous law school run by the O’Davoran family.

The sky clears, the sun shines and the evening is as if summer should never have been doubted. Locals and tourists alike sit in the sun on the grassy terrace of Cassidy’s pub, gazing out across the Burren and revelling in its beauty.

Carran to Corofin (20 km)

A cool breeze. The sky holding back rain. Out past Cassidys with views out over the Carran polje, a flat-floored depression hollowed out by the dissolution of rock by rainwater. It is enclosed by steep flanks made up of boulders, clay and stone deposited here by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. In periods of high rainfall, the polje holds water and becomes an ephemeral lake, a turlough. In winter, when there is water, you see wigeon ducks, teal ducks and white-fronted geese. When the waters disappear underground they wash the grasslands with calcium which reputedly makes the bone structure of the cattle strong. It’s said that a phosphorescent light sometimes hovers over the turlough at night; a will-o’-the wisp luring travellers onto dangerous land.

A bronze age cooking site. An early Christian fort. Down narrow, winding country lanes, a green mossy tangle of hazel woods on either side of the lane. Out into more open country. Circular stone wall enclosures. Wind-sculptured hazel trees. A nest high up in one of the few surviving old ash trees. Parknabinna wedge tomb, built around 2,000 BC on a high point on the uplands and facing south-west towards the setting sun.

A swirling landscape of twisted conical hills and limestone pavements. A view across to Mullaghmore, one of the easternmost Burren hills, all bare and folded and tilted. The ruin of a 16th-century castle once occupied by Captain Edmund Blood, here at the behest of Lord Inchiquin to introduce law and order ‘among the wild and unruly’.

A Moravian church, abandoned in 1798 due to political unrest. An 18th-century Mass Rock, used as an altar by Catholic priests when it was forbidden to openly conduct or attend Catholic Mass. Another rock, this one a dancing platform, used for dancing, singing and music during the same era.

Just as Lake Inchiquin comes into view we meet an American ‘from Upstate New York but living in Michigan now’. He’s out walking the Burren Way for three days as an antidote to several days spent indoors at a conference. He’s the only walker we’ve seen since Ballyvaughan.

Lake Inchiquin is white with swans and dotted with small islands. We stroll along its shores and into the village of Corofin, one of the two endpoints of the Burren Way, for a celebratory Guinness and a toast to a grand walk. And yet, the Burren still has us in its hold so we decide to walk a little more.

Lough Avalla

Through ancient fields, farmed organically, to a spring, a holy well with its sacred tree hung with ribbons and votive offerings, up a rising platform of limestone pavement to a summit with sweeping views of the Slieve Bernagh range to the southeast and, beyond this, the Slieve Felim range that straddles part of the Counties of Limerick and Tipperary. A pause at a Mass Rock then back down through hazel woodland, past elfin goats, a donkey and belted galloway cattle to round Lough Avalla with its dusky pink jetty and end where we began.

Inis Meáin

Tim Robinson describes the Aran Islands as ‘fragments of a single, low, long escarpment, a broken arm of the limestone uplands of the Burren’. County Clare is where the islands leave the mainland so we take a ferry from Doolin to Inis Meáin, the quietest and least populated of the islands, 20 kilometres out to sea. It is a wild, mythical and beautiful place. We walk the Inis Meáin Way out to Dún Fearbhaí, a fort built on high ground in the east of the island and onto Dún Chonchún in the west of the island. These two forts, homesteads to early medieval chiefs, date back to the 1st century AD. Their concentric stone walls rise to a height of six metres.

The island’s history and way of living is marked by pale-grey stone structures: the two forts; an intricate web of dry stone wall enclosures; a collapsed wedge tomb named after tragic lovers from Irish mythology; bothans, small stone thatch-roofed sheds used for storing hay; An Clochán, a beehive-shaped hut used as a monastic cell by pilgrims between the 6th and 13th century; ingenious sloping stone water harvesters; and a modern, lowrise, sympathetically-designed restaurant owned by the same island family that draws on the heritage of the island to create some of the most beautiful knitwear in the world.

When we’re done with walking and taking in the sea, the storm beach and the quiet mood of the island we sit in its only bar and listen to the locals conversing in Irish. One of them asks, in English, if we’re staying overnight. There’s a play written by an islander being performed at Dún Chonchún tonight and traditional music in the bar afterwards. Next time we say, next time we will stay for days and listen to stories of drowned sons and the great beauty and tradition born out of isolation. For now, we must catch the ferry back to ‘mad busy Doolin’ and end our Burren Way.

Each footfall of the Burren Way is a connection with the ancient and recent past. Neolithic monuments, early Christian strongholds, landscapes shaped over many thousands of years by ice and water and still changing. Reminders of childhood; old men singing songs of loss and love in bars, women walking out of churches with bottles of holy water for the home, cards left in letterboxes for masses said for a sick child. All merging and swirling as the hills and the sea and the clouds swirl. Catch[ing] the heart off guard and blow[ing] it open. This and the silence and stark beauty are what we will carry with us. Until we return.