50 Fun Facts About The Burren

Which 1980s fantasy film used the Cliffs of Moher, beside the Burren, as its Cliffs of Insanity?

The Princess Bride. The Cliffs of Moher stand in for the Cliffs of Insanity, though almost all the rest of the film was shot in England, much of it in Derbyshire.

What does the Irish name Boirinn, from which "Burren" comes, mean?

Rocky district is the sense of the Irish boireann, which dictionaries gloss as rock or rocky country. Medieval monks took a kinder view: they named their abbey in a green Burren valley St Mary of the Fertile Rock.

Pol an Ionain, a show cave on the Burren's western edge, is famed for one of the world's longest what?

A stalactite: the Great Stalactite hangs free from the roof of its chamber. Two cavers found it in 1952 after a long, difficult crawl.

Which island group is a geological extension of the Burren's limestone hills?

The Aran Islands belong to County Galway, but their rock is Clare's: the Burren's limestone runs on under the sea and resurfaces as the islands' fissured pavements and endless stone walls.

In which geological period did the Burren's limestone form as sediment in a tropical sea?

Carboniferous. Well over 300 million years ago this part of Ireland lay just south of the equator under a warm, shallow sea, and the shells and corals that piled up on its floor hardened into the Burren's limestone.

What are the flat slabs of limestone pavement called, as opposed to the fissures between them?

Clints are the slabs; the cracks between them are grikes. Rainwater widened natural joints in the limestone into those fissures, whose shelter and moisture let ferns and wildflowers grow out of bare rock.

The Caher is unusual among the Burren's rivers because it does what?

Stays above ground to the sea: it is the only river that crosses the Burren's limestone on the surface. Everywhere else rain sinks into cracks in the rock and travels through caves, so the hills have almost no streams.

What rock caps Slieve Elva, the highest hill in the Burren?

Shale. Dark shale once buried the whole Burren and glaciers stripped it from the limestone almost everywhere, but Slieve Elva kept its cap, so the highest hill in a region famous for bare limestone is not limestone at all.

The Burren is a classic example of which landscape type, named after a limestone plateau in Slovenia?

Karst is the German form of Kras, a plateau behind Trieste where such scenery was first described. Rain slowly dissolves the limestone, leaving caves, sinking streams and enclosed hollows with no outlet.

Granite boulders on the northern Burren pavements were carried by ice from which region?

Connemara, across Galway Bay: an earlier ice sheet pushed south over the bay and dropped its granite on the limestone. The last ice came from the north-east instead and left mostly limestone boulders behind.

Alpine and Arctic flowers grow in the Burren side by side with plants from which warm region?

The Mediterranean. Flowers of the high Alps bloom here almost at sea level beside southern species, and lime-loving plants grow next to acid-loving ones, an unlikely mix that has made the region famous among botanists.

Which vivid blue flower, native to the Alps, grows wild on the Burren's limestone?

The spring gentian. At home in high Alpine pastures and very rare in northern Europe, it surprises visitors to the Burren by flowering almost at sea level.

Which flower family has over 20 Burren species, among them bee and butterfly kinds?

Orchids. More than twenty kinds flower on these thin limestone pastures, helped by grazing cattle that clear away the tough grasses and leave room and light for wildflowers.

The Burren green, found nowhere else in Ireland or Britain, is what kind of creature?

A moth, Calamia tridens, with pale green wings. Widespread in central Europe, it was unknown in these islands until a collector found it on the Burren's limestone grassland in 1949, and it has turned up nowhere else since.

The Burren is one of Ireland's main breeding areas for which elusive mammal?

The pine marten held on in western strongholds like the Burren when it had become rare across Ireland. As it spreads back, it is credited with driving down the invasive grey squirrel, to the native red's benefit.

When do Burren farmers traditionally move their cattle up onto the limestone hills?

In winter, the reverse of hill farming almost everywhere else. The dry limestone hills go on growing grass, so cattle graze them from October to April, and their grazing clears the way for the spring wildflowers.

Which Cromwellian general said the Burren lacked water to drown a man, wood to hang one, or earth to bury him?

Edmund Ludlow, second-in-command of Parliament's army in Ireland, set the saying down after marching through in 1651. He added that the cattle were nonetheless very fat, because the grass growing between the rocks was so sweet.

Poulnabrone dolmen is what type of monument?

A portal tomb: two tall portal stones flank the entrance beneath the great capstone, and a low mound of stones around the base helped to brace the uprights. The chamber was in use some 5,800 years ago.

What did 1980s digs find under Poulnabrone dolmen?

Many people's bones: the remains of more than twenty adults and children, placed in the chamber over about six centuries along with a stone axe, bone jewellery and pottery. One was a baby buried there far later, in the Bronze Age.

Which type of megalithic tomb makes up most of the Burren's prehistoric burial monuments?

Wedge tombs went up around 2500 to 2000 BC, in what seems to have been a boom time for the Burren's farmers; in the centuries that followed, the population appears to have dwindled.

Which Bronze Age treasure was found in a Burren rock crevice?

A gold collar: the Gleninsheen gorget, made around 800 to 700 BC and now in the National Museum. Like most of its kind it was bent in two before being hidden, probably to take it out of use for good.

Stone-walled ringforts, hundreds of which dot the Burren, are known by which name?

Cashels, from the Irish caiseal, a stone fort; the earth-banked kind found across most of Ireland is a rath. So many survive on the Burren that archaeologists read them as proof of a sizeable farming population in early medieval times.

Roughly how old is Caherconnell, the well-preserved stone ringfort beside Poulnabrone?

About 1,000 years: digs date the fort to the 10th century, so it is medieval, thousands of years younger than the dolmen up the road. Its owners were still putting up a new building inside it some 500 years later.

Corcomroe Abbey in the north Burren was founded around 1200 by which monastic order?

The Cistercians settled a green valley among the bare limestone hills, and the abbey's old name records the contrast: St Mary of the Fertile Rock.

Which clan ruled the Burren from Gregans Castle until the mid-17th century, its chief styled "Prince of Burren"?

The O'Loughlins held the Burren from their tower house at Gregans, princes in name but subjects in fact, since the far mightier O'Briens of Thomond were their overlords. Their dead lie beside the altar of Corcomroe Abbey.

In 1318 local clans defeated a Norman army led by Richard de Clare at which battle on the Burren's edge?

Dysert O'Dea: Richard de Clare was killed, and his widow burned Bunratty Castle and fled. The kingdom of Thomond then stayed out of foreign hands for more than two centuries.

Where did Máire Rua ("Red Mary"), who reputedly wed a Cromwellian officer to save her lands, live?

Leamaneh Castle, where she and her husband Conor added a four-storey mansion to the old tower around 1648. Folklore heaped wild legends on her, but the records show she simply lived on there for decades.

What is unusual about Newtown Castle, a 16th-century Burren tower house?

It is round on a square base: the tower rises as a cylinder from a pyramid-like footing. It was restored and reopened in 1994, under a new oak roof, to serve the newly founded Burren College of Art.

Farmer Jack McGann discovered Aillwee Cave in the 1940s while doing what?

Following his dog, which had chased a rabbit into the hillside. He went only a short way in and kept the find to himself for some thirty years; cavers explored it in 1973 and it soon opened as a show cave.

The bones of which animal, more than 10,000 years old, were found in Aillwee Cave in 1976?

Brown bears, long extinct in Ireland, seem to have slept out their winters here: besides the bones, the cave floor still shows the shallow pits they scraped out as beds. It has been called Ireland's last bear den.

Which Burren cave, at over 16 kilometres, is the longest in all of Ireland?

Pollnagollum, the 'cave of the pigeons', swallows the hill streams above it at the point where they cross onto limestone. An antiquarian ventured in as early as 1880, but its passages were not properly explored until the 20th century.

What is a turlough, a feature of the Burren's limestone country?

A seasonal lake that drains away underground: it fills from below through cracks in the limestone when the water table rises in the wet months, then empties the same way, leaving summer grazing. Almost all turloughs are in Ireland.

What did campaigners stop the Irish state from building at Mullaghmore, in Burren National Park?

A visitor centre. Building had already started when seven locals went to the High Court in the early 1990s and had the work halted; after ten years of argument, planning permission was finally refused in March 2000.

Which international designation does the Burren share with the Cliffs of Moher?

Global Geopark: the Burren and Cliffs of Moher joined the worldwide network in 2011. The county council manages it, and the status is no permanent badge: it has to be earned afresh every four years.

The Burren Way, a five-day walking trail, sets out from the beach of which surfing town?

Lahinch. From its surf beach the 114-kilometre trail climbs to the Cliffs of Moher, then turns inland and crosses the limestone on green lanes and old droving roads, tracks made for walking cattle, to finish at Corofin.

Which Clare village near the Cliffs of Moher is the Burren's traditional music centre?

Doolin owes much of its musical name to three local brothers, the Russells. The folk revival of the 1960s brought Micho Russell and his tin whistle to wide attention, and the village's pub sessions with him.

Which Burren-edge spa town has hosted a September matchmaking festival for more than 160 years?

Lisdoonvarna's festival began as a chance for people from scattered rural communities to meet a match. By the 2020s it filled the whole of September with music and dancing, with Willie Daly as its matchmaker and keeper of the ledger.

Which Irish folk singer wrote a song celebrating the north Clare spa town's music festival of 1978-83?

Christy Moore's comic roll-call of a song has outlived the festival, which ended in 1983 after a riot and the drowning of eight people. In 2010 his lyric was printed in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry.

Which Burren village, a medieval bishop's seat, is known as the "City of the Crosses"?

Kilfenora takes the name from its carved high crosses: tradition counts seven, and five survive. The finest, the Doorty Cross, spent years in two pieces, its shaft serving as a family gravestone, until the halves were reunited in the 1950s.

In church law, the Bishop of Galway runs the Burren's tiny cathedral diocese only as stand-in for whom?

The Pope. The little diocese lay in a different church province from the one it was joined to in 1750, so it has had no bishop of its own since: a neighbour runs it as apostolic administrator, on the Pope's behalf.

The Father Ted parochial house stands on the road out of which Burren village?

Kilnaboy: the house is Glanquin, a family farmhouse well inland, though on screen it stands on windswept Craggy Island. Only the outside was ever used, since the priests' rooms were a set in a London studio.

Michael Cusack, co-founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, was born in which small Burren village?

Carron: Cusack left it to become a Dublin schoolmaster, and in 1884 he called the meeting in Thurles that founded the GAA. James Joyce is thought to have modelled the hot-tempered 'Citizen' of Ulysses partly on him.

The Burren College of Art is based in which harbour village on Galway Bay?

Ballyvaughan. The college was founded in 1993 in the grounds of Newtown Castle, a 16th-century tower house just outside the village, and restored the old tower to serve as its centrepiece.

The Cliffs of Moher reach their maximum height of 214 metres just north of which landmark?

O'Brien's Tower was built in 1835 by the local landlord and MP Cornelius O'Brien as a lookout for the tourists already coming to see the cliffs. He was convinced that visitors would bring prosperity to a poor district.

Which Harry Potter film sent Harry and Dumbledore to a sea cave filmed at the Cliffs of Moher?

Half-Blood Prince (2009): the Cliffs of Moher are the outside of the cave where Harry and Dumbledore hunt a Horcrux, but the cavern inside was a studio set, an island of crystal ringed by green screen.

The Burren is particularly known for the West Clare style of playing which instrument?

The concertina reached Ireland in the 19th century as a German import that was cheap and easy to learn. Clare made it its own: when the county's traditional music branch was founded, concertina player Mrs Crotty was elected president.

Before the first farmers arrived, what covered most of the Burren's uplands?

Mixed woodland of pine, yew and broadleaved trees, as ancient pollen shows. Farmers began clearing it about 6,000 years ago, and once the trees were gone, heavy rain stripped the thin soil and bared the rock.

Remains of hundreds of which Bronze Age structure survive in the Burren?

Fulachtai fiadh are horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt stone around a sunken trough: stones heated in a fire were dropped in to boil the water. Whether that was for cooking, brewing or bathing, nobody is sure.

Cora Harrison's Burren Mysteries follow a 16th-century woman judge who upholds which legal system?

Brehon law, Ireland's native code, lasted in the Burren until English common law displaced it in the 1600s. A real law school at the ringfort of Cahermacnaghten, near the author's home, gave her the idea for the series.

Which seabird's colony on Goat Island is a summer highlight for visitors to the Cliffs of Moher?

The Atlantic puffin. Its colony shares the cliffs with tens of thousands of guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes, which is why the whole cliff face is protected by law as a sanctuary for nesting seabirds.