Guest Post # 3 – The Burren
Welcome back and you are very welcome to this post on the Burren.
Lying just south of Galway Bay, the Burren is a severe mountainous limestone region in County Clare. We travelled by rental car from Galway to our Burren base of Ballyvaughan. Seemingly overestimating the remoteness of the region (don’t think we were in the car for longer than about 45 minutes), or perhaps just eager to do something useful as compensation for his inability to drive a car on the left-hand side of the road, Kevin insisted on making a stop along the way to load up on goodies for the walks we had planned. We passed at least two more such markets on our way to our B&B and discovered another about thirty feet from our accommodation. Ballyvaughan Lodge had come enthusiastically recommended to us by Hawk’s colleague, but the couple running the place had never heard of her and, in fact, were unsure whether the Irish name Kevin blurted out belonged to a man or a woman. They seemed a bit put out by our late arrival, or at least the woman did, as she sat gloomily in front of her telly. The man appeared intent on making up for her moodiness via the convivial welcoming technique of using Kevin’s name as many times as possible in the first five minutes (though he seemed equally determined to ignore me): “Welcome Kevin, now look here Kevin, this is the door you’ll be using Kevin, your room is right this way Kevin, will you take Kevin in your Kevin in the morning Kevin?”
We had arrived a little late because we decided to visit a nearby waterfall known as the Seven Streams. I had heard about this place from the poet David Whyte, a frequent visitor to the Burren region, although the site was not so well known to the locals. On advice from the tourist office in Galway, we stopped in at the Burren Perfumery, where we were directed to a property from which we could gain access to the streams. A barely visible sign at the side of our path told us that we were indeed headed in the right direction – but I’m not sure that where we ended up was indeed the Seven Streams. No matter – the mossy side of the hill we found was very peaceful, and clambering farther up we came across a spot that afforded good views across the Burren. The Hawk’s eye was in good form in front of his camera.
Dinner at Logue’s Lodge Ballyvaughan turned out to be something of a curiosity: it wasn’t the food (“no duck!” – those words had the same annihilating effect on me as “no ray” on Kevin in Galway), nor the pub, but the fact that they had a intern on their staff, a young French lass, who was all at sea with the first thing we said to her – which I believe was “top of the evening to you” or something to that effect. We were soon informed of her Gallic origins and unacquaintance with the English language, and hence that is was only possible to communicate with her via hand signals and accommodating smiles. That would have presented your man Kevin with the perfect opportunity of approaching La interne to practice his French and perhaps even arrange to meet her the next day for a tandem lesson; but not a peep out of him did we hear.
After a better night’s sleep we had a full day to explore the Burren. The morning saw us walking up nearby Abbey Hill, our route taking us past St. Patrick’s Well. Surveying the misty conditions, I needed no second invitation to proudly don my plastic rain suit fitted with peaked hood and pseudo-familial crest, purchased for 4 dollars (good for all debts, public and private) at Kiwanis. The water at the well was cool and refreshing, a real boon for walkers, or at least those of us who drank from her. Abbey Hill was quite difficult going, though the reliable slabs of limestone held firm as we zigzagged our way up. We stopped periodically to sample the good views of the bay behind us and to consult our rather poetically authored book on walking in Western Ireland (“The track verges providing more variety with BRAMBLE and DOG ROSE clambering up through the few bushes”). We also appreciated our author’s enthusiastic account of the arctic flowers that mysteriously grow about the Burren, but chose to ignore – then as on other occasions - his recommendation that we undertake the walk with the aid of a cane, though I could have sworn I saw Kevin fossicking about for one at his favoured supermarket.
Back at our car, we decided to drive round the other side of the hill to visit the Corcomroe Abbey itself, an open ruin dotted with gravestones (to my eye a ghost is clearly visible in the photo posted here). From there Hawkworthy did a superb job of navigating us westward through the narrow wall-lined streets toward the small beachside town of Fanore. The late writer, poet, and former-priest John O’Donohue is buried in the graveyard there, just down the road from the simple church which hosted his funeral. O’Donohue, who had lived for some years in Connemara, died unexpectedly at the beginning of 2008. I came to know his work about a year later, mostly through the many talks that he gave and which I have either downloaded or purchased online, a good number of which I inflicted on poor Kevin on the roads and even at night as a preparatory for falling asleep. It was O’Donohue’s passionate advocation of Western Ireland and its people that inspired me to go there. Later that evening, on the other side of dinner (Logue’s Lodge again: still no duck, and this time no French intern so perhaps they had given up on her) we climbed the karst hill close to Fanore, and though we didn’t realise it at the time, our chosen path took us to a spot high above that town from where we looked down far into the distance upon O’Donohue’s graveyard and to the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
To round off our trip to the Burren we spent a nice couple of hours in a whiskey bar in Ballyvaughan, guests of a colleague of Kevin. That more or less placed him in the role of conversational moderator, but he barely knew her, and was so frequently at a loss for things to say, that the causal observer might have easily confused him for a Frenchman interning as a hapless patron of a remote whiskey bar in western Ireland. Though Kevin’s guest wasn’t at a loss for things to say, what she said was at a loss for forming coherent units, but perhaps that was just because I still had the eloquent John O’Donohue ringing in my ear. He was incidentally a regular at that bar as attested by a photo of him in the corner marking his favourite spot.
It remained for us to wolf down our magnificent Irish breakfast the next morning, make small talk with our hosts at the Ballyvaughan Lodge (the woman was finally in a serviceably good mood, and it’s funny how that coincided with our departure), before loading our hotbox of a car and heading toward Connemara.
Summary: The Burren: boldly austere, thus halfway to being a Hawkins place.