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The Burren

A timeless landscape of space and silence, a magical limestone paradise that has inspired generations

This is one of Ireland’s most captivating sights, the lunar like barren landscape of North Clare. The Burren is the largest expanse of limestone pavement in the world.

The word “Burren” comes from an Irish word “Boíreann” meaning a rocky place. This is an extremely appropriate name when you consider the lack of soil cover and the extent of exposed Limestone Pavement. However, the Burren is also referred to as the “Fertile rock” due to the mixture of herb and floral species found here. Arctic-alpine plants live side by side with Mediterranean plants, lime-loving and acid-loving plants grow adjacent to one another, and woodland plants grow out in the open with not a tree nearby to provide shade from the sun. All of these plants survive in a land that appears to be composed entirely of rock.

The Burren is underlain by limestone formed as sediments in a tropical sea which covered most of Ireland approximately 350 million years ago. Much later, only about 2 million years ago the ice age started in northern Europe. Huge masses of ice came from the north and scoured the surface ripping up soil and rock, carving valleys and then depositing the rocks as the ice melted. We can see these rocks scattered across the Burren as erratic boulders today. The Burren is one of the finest examples of a Glacio-Karst landscape in the world.

The limestone environment of the Burren has resulted in a durable kind of farming with a 6,000-year history. The unique practice of winterage or allowing cattle to graze the hills and mountains in the winter, is still a major part of farming in the Burren today. This clears the ground of difficult grasses and allows plant life to grow in the spring, thereby ensuring the continuity of the fragile biodiversity of the region.

Murrough Mountain

Murrough Mountain, our mountain, is 1,000 acres of limestone paving rising to over 1,000 ft above sea level before sweeping into the Atlantic Ocean on the edge of Galway Bay.
Most of the paving in this vast karsk landscape remains untouched by humans, though our ancestors lived on the mountain over 5,000 years ago.

People come here from all over the world to get close to nature, to get a better understanding of this mystical, magical limestone paradise and to reclaim the innocence that has been lost to progress.