Rare Flowers and Ruined Choirs

July 9, 2000

Rare Flowers and Ruined Choirs

By LISA FUGARD

Smitten by the crumbling churches and brilliant plant life of the Burren, County Clare's limestone landscape that stretches to the sea

F birders go birding then those who seek out wildflowers surely go flowering; the term botanizing doesn't begin to capture the sweet delight I experienced on discovering the profusion of wildflowers growing in the Burren in County Clare on Ireland's west coast. My romance with bird's-foot trefoil, mountain avens and herb Robert came about by accident. When I flew into Shannon last July and met my mother, Sheila, for a 10-day holiday, it was with the intention of viewing shore birds and, with luck, a few seals.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Wild orchids along the Kyber Pass in the Burren.

Bleak and harsh are the adjectives often used to describe the Burren, a roughly 100-square-mile limestone landscape of cliffs, stony hills and broad stretches of rock resembling pavement. I have an affinity for such landscapes, as does my mother, and the boireann, the Irish word for rocky place, did not disappoint us.
Two and a half hours after leaving the airport in a sardine-can-sized rental car, well suited to skinny country roads, we crested a hill just above a stretch of coastline called Pol Salach and saw a stunning panorama of fierce Ireland -- shattered terraces of stark limestone spilling into a sea that was gray as elephant skin.
We followed the coast road through the lonely village of Fanore where horses grazed in rock-strewn pastures next to the beach, past Black Head where the limestone cliffs plunged into the sea. Masses of oxeye daisies and fuchsias blooming on the side of the road softened the austere beauty of the rock. By the time we reached Ballyvaughan, a tiny village sitting on a tranquil corner of Galway Bay, we were enamored of the Burren. Smoked salmon and mussels at Monk's Bar on the quay and two elegant bedrooms in Rusheen Lodge, a four-star guest house, only added to our satisfaction.
The next morning we drove into the hills behind Ballyvaughan where flinty stone walls divided the land into pastures. I was itching to walk among the rocks, but in planning the trip I had promised my mother a ruin a day. My passion for the natural world is matched by her passion for mosques, temples, tombs and ruined churches. Such churches abound in the Burren, as do ring forts and Neolithic tombs.
Our first visit was to the village of Kilfe nora where the tiniest medieval cathedral awaited us. The nave or front section is still used for church services while the roofless chancel radiates stillness and mystery. Two identical stone carvings -- apparently the head of a bishop -- have a vaguely Egyptian air about them. A delicate trefoil sedilia -- three seats crowned with a beautifully carved pinnacle -- is recessed into one wall, while on the adjacent wall are two naïvely incised 13th- and 14th-century stone carvings. One of them, supposedly of a cleric, had us perplexed. What did the oval head and elongated neck remind us of? Where had we seen that serene, otherworldly demeanor? My mother, who is half Irish and has a streak of sly Irish wit about her, solved that mystery when she exclaimed
"The Holy Alien!"
Pelting rain and sudden squalls, rain that drizzles and mizzles -- Ireland is one of the few countries where such weather is shrugged off, hardly a deterrent to wildflower adventures.
After lunch I dropped my mother back at the B & B and, armed with "Wild Plants of the Burren and the Aran Islands," bought at the Burren Interpretive Center at Kilfenora, and a large umbrella (which immediately marked me as a foreigner and a sissy), I drove 40 minutes along the coast road to rocky Pol Salach for my first afternoon of flowering.
The great mystique of the flora of the Burren lies in its diversity and its growing habits -- Mediterranean and arctic-alpine plants thrive side by side. None of the species are unique to the Burren, but many grow in the limestone landscape in greater abundance than anywhere else in Ireland or Britain.
I parked the car, climbed over a low stone wall and crouched on the ground. Crushing wild thyme between my fingers, I breathed deep. I'd identified my first wildflower. And what were the tiny white flowers intertwined with the thyme? I thumbed through my flower book.

Yes! It was squinancy wort. After half an hour of literally crawling through a cow pasture so ablaze with flowers it seemed as though a beneficent fairy artist had dipped her paintbrush in magenta, blue, yellow, cream and periwinkle blue and flicked it over the ground, I reached the limestone pavement.
Smooth, relatively flat, rectangular chunks of limestone called clints are separated from one another by fissures that range in depth from one foot to 20. It's in these fissures, or grikes, that the pluckiest of plants flourish. The magenta flowers of bloody cranesbill swayed brightly against the bone-colored rock, and I saw honeysuckle plants twisted into bonsais by the strong winds.
Closer to the sea cliffs I found those plants that thrive in the salty spray gusting off Galway Bay -- bobbing heads of pink thrift and sea campion and thick seaweedy-looking ferns that glistened in the grikes. Of course, there were plants that I couldn't identify.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Rusty-back fern and herb Robert grow in a crevice.

There are over 600 species recorded in the Burren. The book I carried listed 120. I was momentarily frustrated. Then smiled. My naming them didn't bring the flowers into being. Why not simply enjoy them?
Our love affair with the Burren was now well under way, and the following day while driving to Corcomroe, a Cistercian abbey that lies five miles east of Ballyvaughan, my mother fantasized about buying property.
We parked at the end of a country lane and immediately registered an eerie sound that seemed to be rising from the ruined abbey. A ham-fisted ghost stumbling over the bass keys of an organ?
After some investigation the Organist of Corcomroe, as he is now affectionately remembered by my mother and me, turned out to be a most handsome blond bull lowing to several docile black-and-white cows cloistered in a field on the opposite side of the road. While Kilfenora's chancel is exquisitely intimate, Corcomroe, with the wind gusting through it, feels lonely and desolate. It also has a stunning roof, as do most of the churches we visited, with a wide swath of changeable Irish sky through which the rooks wheeled and cawed. On some of the pillars the traces of carvings of flowers can be found, a stony reminder of the abbey's other name, Our Lady of the Fertile Rocks. In one corner there is a recumbent effigy said to be that of an O'Brien king killed nearby in 1267. Above it is an unfinished 14th-century carving, presumably of the abbot of Corcomroe. With a hint of a smile on his face and rather puffy attire, he looks as though he's levitating up the ruined chancel.
"Three days is not enough time to explore the Burren," I lamented over dinner that night in the superb Whitethorn restaurant.
Reservations in Connemara awaited us, so the following day we left for County Galway. On our way we stopped at Thoor Ballylee near the town of Gort -- less than an hour's drive from Ballyvaughan -- where Yeats summered from 1917 to 1929. The recorded commentary issuing from speakers in his dining room, study and bedroom didn't interest me so I climbed higher. Close to the top of the stone tower I found what was surely the true spirit of Yeats -- a soft-feathered, fierce-eyed kestrel guarding her chick on a nest of sticks.

After two days in Connemara, during which time the sun blazed 16 hours a day and I swam in the stillest, bluest bay I'd ever seen, gray clouds rolled in from the ocean. Rain spattered on the window of our hotel. "Only one place to be in such moody weather," I said to my mother. Back to the Burren we raced.
Rusheen Lodge had been lovely, but I always feel as though I'm staying in my grandparents' house when I visit a B & B. That evening we checked into the Ballinalacken Castle Hotel, a sprawling country house sitting on a hill just below a 15th-century O'Brien tower house. The ruin is now roped off because too many visitors were leaving with chunks of genuine Irish castle in their pockets.
We felt like Burren old-timers, and our remaining days took on an easy routine. In the mornings we visited churches, castles and towers. There was Dysert O'Dea, where a bizarre array of Romanesque-style animal and human heads arches over the south doorway of the church. Lemaneagh Castle, worthy of at least a few ghosts, stands proud in a stretch of windswept farmland (equally creepy was the electric fence surrounding the field and the old Irish codger who scowled at the few cars parked just beyond his land). In Killinaboy we came across a humble ruined church with a simple carving of the Crucifixion and the weathered Sheila na gig, an ancient fertility symbol, above the entrance.
Each afternoon I went flowering. A walk up the Kyber Pass, a road in Fanore that follows the Caher River -- the only surface river in the Burren, as most of the rainwater seeps into the underground waterways -- will be remembered as the afternoon I discovered orchids. Except for the exquisite bee orchid, the terrestrial species of the Burren are not as showy as tropical orchids that cling to trees. Still, I was captivated by their demure beauty.
On another day I went mad for ferns. I kept meaning to hike one of the ancient green roads that lace the Burren; they're noted for the wildflowers but I was smitten with rock, with the way a saucer-sized depression on a boulder could hold an array of small flowers brilliant as jewels, the way the wind gusting off Galway Bay tossed the tousled pink flowers of hemp agrimony, a species that grew en masse in the limestone fissures.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Stone Age remains at Poulnabrone.

And then there was the food -- lobsters, crabs, black sole, salmon, mussels. We feasted every evening at local restaurants and returned to our hotel -- my mother had renamed it Fawlty Castle in honor of the quirky yet utterly charming staff -- in time for sunset tea, which, in early July, was at about 9 p.m.

On our last morning in the Burren I wandered the pavement at Pol Salach, saying goodbye to yet another part of the world I'd fallen in love with. My evening reading had been from a chapter in "The Burren: A Companion to the Wildflowers of an Irish Limestone Wilderness" that touched on the historical use of many of the plants I'd been rhapsodizing over, and as I whispered the names of the flowers surrounding me, I felt as though I were floating back in time. Lady's bedstraw -- makes good bedding and can be used as a rennet plant for curdling milk; squinancy wort -- useful if I ever get an attack of quinsy; carline thistle -- preserve the buds with honey and sugar for a tasty sweetmeat; Burnet rose -- I'll drink a syrup made from the rosehips if I'm coughing, spitting blood or stricken with scurvy.
The monks of Corcomroe must have put many of these plants to medicinal use. Perhaps the levitating abbot secretly snacked on carline thistles. As for the Holy Alien? That otherworldly, rather blissful demeanor might have come about from one too many afternoons spent flowering.

Reveling in bird's-foot trefoil, squinancy wort and thrift
Lodging

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Stone Age remains at Poulnabrone.

Rusheen Lodge. Just outside the village of Ballyvaughan, this four-star guest house has six lovely, spacious rooms with private bathrooms, and two suites. Doubles are $72; the suites $108, full breakfast included, calculated at $1.21 to the Irish pound. Telephone (353-65) 70 77092, fax (353-65) 70 77152.

Ballinalacken Castle Hotel. We loved this creaky yet elegant hotel on the outskirts of Lisdoonvarna. Drinking tea in the sitting room and sprawling about our spacious, rather oddly but grandly decorated room made us feel like fading aristocrats. Some rooms have splendid views of the Aran Islands, while others (nos. 5, 6, 10 and 11) do not. Doubles are $48 to $54, with full Irish breakfast.

For reservations, telephone or fax (353-65) 70 74025.
Dining
Sheedy's Hotel and Restaurant. What this restaurant in Lisdoonvarna lacks in décor it makes up for with superb food. I had an entree of black sole so exquisite I wonder if I'll ever eat fish that fresh again. A three-course dinner for two, excluding drinks, averages $60. Sheedy's bar has a seafood menu. Telephone (353-65) 70 74026.

The Whitethorn. Situated a half mile east of Ballyvaughan on the coast road to Galway, this elegant restaurant has a stunning view of Galway Bay. Dinner for two averages $70 and is served Friday and Saturday nights only in July and August. Weekends and weekdays the lunch service is buffet style and the food is just as delicious.

Attached is a shop crammed with good clothing, Irish crafts and all the guidebooks needed to explore the Burren. Telephone (353-65) 70 77044. Information
The Burren Interpretive Center at Kilfe nora, the first such center in Ireland, has models and exhibits explaining the geology, flora and fauna of the Burren, as well as an audiovisual lecture of the area. Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. through September (to 5 p.m. October to May). Telephone (353-65) 70 88030. Admission $3.

Recommended reading: "The Burren: a Companion to the Wildflowers of an Irish Limestone Wilderness" (Collins Press), by E. Charles Nelson, who is utterly bewitched by the Burren. For help in identifying flowers, pick up a copy of "Wild Plants of the Burren and the Aran Islands," also by E. Charles Nelson. Both books are available at the Whitethorn and the Burren Interpretive Center at Kilfenora.
--LISA FUGARD

Ask Travel questions in Abuzz, a new knowledge network from The New York Times. Get answers and tell other readers what you know.

Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today