A Burren affair to remember

ON a damp June morning in 1991 Paul Clements walked out of Ballyvaughan. Trying to thumb a lift on the Doolin road, he was wet and getting wetter. Behind him, loomed Black Head. It was one of his first encounters with the world of the Burren and it wasn’t promising.
Black Head seemed bleak, austere, even hostile. He didn’t know it but that meeting would change his life. Twenty years later the former BBC journalist has written a love letter to that world in Burren Country, Travels through an Irish Limestone Landscape.
Within 30 minutes, Paul’s first impressions of his surroundings – and the rain – were fading. Shy light breaking through the clouds splattered bright colours across Black Head’s murky canvass.
“I realised there was something about the Burren that spoke to me and made me want to find out more about it,” Paul explains from his home in Belfast.
“There was clearly much more to the place than any fleeting hitchhiker could hope to discover. I resolved then to return and find out for myself exactly what makes the Burren special for so many people.”
That day was the beginning of a love affair – one that Paul describes in his book as “unrequited and obsessive, a grande passion”.
Such is the intensity of his relationship with the Burren that before each visit the writer can’t sleep for days, possibly weeks, thanks to the anticipation of seeing his beloved again. “The sorcerer’s magic has weaved its spell,” he writes. “The Burren has marinated me in its mystery and haunting magnetism.”
Burren Country, Travels through an Irish Limestone Landscape is a collection of 16 essays exploring the history, landscape and people of an environment that David Bellamy called “a time capsule of the last 6,000 years”.
The book takes pen portraits of places like Gleninagh and Mullaghmore, blends them with hymns to the Burren’s wild flowers and glacial erratics and serves it up with profiles of writers, painters and musicians who have made the Burren their home.
“It’s not a guidebook but more of a travel book in one place,” the author explains.
“I classify it as a prose map of the Burren but it could be used by readers to help them find out about a particular place and may even inspire them to visit certain areas. I have tried to convey some of the affection and awe that people have for the place.”
In writing about it, Paul set out to capture the landscape in a creative way. A “typecast vocabulary” of phrases are used to describe the Burren, he says.
‘Desert’ and ‘wilderness’ are the most common while ‘lunar’ is shorthand for a complex environment. He was conscious of walking a tightrope above a safety net of clichés.
“It wasn’t easy to write about it with an original slant because so much has already been done,” Paul says. “Yet when I spoke to local people I realised there are always new ways of seeing things and I approached it as an outsider, so that gives a different perspective.”
Paul has honed his writing skills on two travel books about Ireland and runs creative writing weekends in Ballyvaughan each May and June. When portraying the Burren, Paul adopted the philosophy of Edward Abbey, the American nature and landscape writer, who emphasised the importance of “having eyes to see”.
This approach is typified by vivid, keen observations scattered throughout the Burren, veering from eavesdropping on birdsong on Lough Mask to the taste of place names like Ballykinvarga on the tongue and from an industrious web-spinning spider in the solitude of Sheshymore to the shimmering pink hues cast across the limestone on a spring evening. 
Laced with beautiful photographs, Paul frames the book around, amongst others, the landscape’s archaeology, botany and geology. To build up this depth of understanding, the author read widely, from scholarly research to magazines, but also spoke with experts and, especially, explored the landscape for himself.
“I interviewed several specialists on some of the topics as well as taking copious amounts of notes during my walks across the limestone pavement, along the back roads, around the coastline and up and down the hills,” he says.
“It can take a considerable length of time to build up a store of Burren knowledge. When you realise the wealth and volume of information, I feel I’ve made only a few scratches on the limestone pavement.”
Early in the book, Paul brings the reader on a tour of the vast academic studies, from analysis of butterflies to cow dung, recorded in the Burren. In presenting this, his aim was to grapple with the scientific data, select the aspects that would most appeal to the general reader and reflect the breadth of research focused on the Burren. This involved some of the biggest challenges in preparing the book.
“There is a veritable landslide of commentary on the Burren,” he says.
“It is probably the most documented piece of ground anywhere in Ireland. I have tried to give a flavour of the scholarly work but at the same time not overdo the amount of detail. It was a balancing act and one of the hardest aspects of my own research.”
While the book is always alive to the natural history of the landscape, this is never at the expense of human stories. In fact, it’s through the influence of the environment on some of its inhabitants that the magnificence of the Burren is sometimes most clearly realised.
“I wanted to see the Burren through the eyes of creative people whose lives have been shaped by the place,” Paul explains. “Much of our culture in Ireland is based on place and landscape and it is extraordinary just how much the Burren has inspired and informed the work of so many people over the years. It could be the colour of the light, the layers of history, the flowers, rocks or walls. Most of them feel they could not have achieved what they did, had it not been for the wonder that the Burren throws up.”

n Paul will run creative
writing weekends in Ballyvaughan on selected dates in May and June 2012 details of which will be posted on www.paulclementswriting.com