Tag Archives: Cattle Drive

Hundreds of people from the Burren and further afield gathered over the recent October Bank Holiday Weekend to join in the Burren Winterage Weekend, a celebration of the Burren’s unique farming heritage. For thousands of years, Burren farmers have marked the end of summer by herding their cattle up onto winter pastures in the limestone uplands, in the tradition known as winterage and the Burren is one of the only places in the world where it still occurs. Winterage has been integral to shaping today’s familiar Burren landscape. With coordination support by local landscape charity Burrenbeo Trust, community members put on an amazing range of events including a community gathering, herdsman walk, heritage walks in Ballyvaughan and Fanore, farmers market and farming innovation fair. The weekend culminated in the community cattle drive where the community followed a herd of cattle into the Burren hills where they will spend the winter. The weekend was a great celebration of this rich tradition …

More than 100 delegates from across Europe are expected to attend the Burren Winterage School in Corofin over the Bank Holiday weekend. The conference begins on this Thursday and continues to Sunday, October 25. Its focus is on supporting high nature value (HNV) farming in Europe. “More than 100 people are coming from Europe to Corofin for the school. It is a big event for North Clare and Corofin especially. This is our window to the world, in terms of Burren farming. It is an opportunity for the farmers here to show off what they do and to highlight the reasons we have programmes like BurrenLife in the first place,” Dr Brendan Dunford of the BurrenLife programme stated. The Winterage School will hear from farmers from diverse landscapes across Europe and will include a variety of presentations by speakers about how farmers can be supported through better policy, research, funding, innovation, empowerment and networking. “Many of the delegates will stay …