Burren

The Burren is what remains when the ice strips a limestone seabed to the bone: grey pavement laid out in clints and grikes, terraced hills like Mullaghmore folded as neatly as poured batter, and almost no surface water on rock that swallows every stream. The national park, declared in 1991, is the smallest in the country — some fifteen square kilometres in the southeastern corner of the wider Burren, wrapped around Mullaghmore and the disappearing lakes, the turloughs, that fill and drain with the water table.

What makes botanists lose their composure here is the flora's refusal to respect biogeography: spring gentian and mountain avens — arctic-alpine plants — flowering beside dense-flowered orchids that belong to the Mediterranean, all in the same fissured square metre. The oddity is maintained by an equally odd farming tradition: winterage, a transhumance in reverse, where cattle graze the uplands through winter and leave them in summer, keeping the scrub down and the grykes in flower. The park is farmed landscape as much as wilderness, and reads best with that in mind.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is deliberately no visitor centre and almost no parking at the park itself: come via Corofin, where the park's information point sits, and use the summer shuttle bus rather than forcing a car onto the green roads. The looped walks from the Gortlecka crossroads — up Mullaghmore especially — are short in distance and slow in practice, since limestone pavement punishes inattention.

Late April through May is the season the Burren is famous for, gentian-blue and busy; the connoisseur's window is a dry day in February, when low sun raking across bare pavement shows the terraces at their most lunar and you will have Mullaghmore to yourself.