Bog Myrtle & Peat

The sea scent’s settled on the Burren in October. Beneath the endless movement of redwings, there’s mist on the hilltops and heavy weights of water suspended from the cobwebs as the Atlantic Ocean breathes into the hills of County Clare. This is stone country, and if ancient Irish stories tell of how humans were punished by petrification, it’s hard to imagine what this entire region did to deserve such a fate.

Across vast sheets of limestone, the only colour is grey which darkens in rain to a ghoulish felted black. Here and there, little thorn trees are screwed into the bare rock like rawlplugs; the earth is reserved only for heaped-up bands and mounds of soil which are strewn around the clints and ridgework of outrageous geology. You might expect to find martian modules landing here from outer space, and the whizzing squeak of gizmos designed to extract samples and determine whether life is possible in such a place. But life is deeply written in every aspect of the Burren, even when it’s spread so sparingly thin.

At the roadside, the deeply rutted limestone pavement is cracked into a maze of ankle-breaking gutters which run in parallel lines for twenty and thirty feet at a time. Into these gutters, flakes of stone have been tucked to stand upright like plates in a dishwasher – the effect is of stacks and the stegs on a dinosaur’s back. In a landscape which already feels geologically ancient, the upright crumbs feel like a deliberate accentuation of deep prehistory. But there are other possibilities at work, and a nearby signpost explains that these stones are linked to the act of praying. I can think of a dozen potential ways to explain this dynamic, even down to the idea that all of these uprights were placed here by one man in a life-long act of penance. More likely they’ve been left up like bog seats one-at-a-time as people have made use of this place and left again over centuries – but follow this thread too far and the first-glance impression of antiquity soon begins to feel shaky. Because who really did this? For all it’s possible that these prayer stones have been here for two thousand years, there’s also a chance that the people who set them up are still alive in nearby towns like Kinvara or Kilfenora.

Catholicism supports a dynamism which reverberates across ancient continuities. Faith is still happening, and new Saints are celebrated all the time – another four were beatified last week, and it often seems like Catholics appreciate the power of their own hands. Antiquity is not a means to an end in itself – it’s continuity and reinvention that counts. For Presbyterians, the help which might have been found in touching or being touched by the world has run out. Perhaps there was a kind of magic in the world at some half-forgotten point, but everything has been sublimated into headspace now. If a handful of objects and buildings are regarded as “holy”, they earn that status on account of their own great age. Presbyterian asceticism often frowns on modernity to the point at which a heart-felt gesture might be called crass simply for having been made yesterday.

John Knox always comes with me to Ireland. He sits on my shoulder and frowns at my curiosity, telling me that I shouldn’t want this kind of relationship – but it’s deeply part of me to change and rearrange the world in my wonder. I was moved by those dew-stained prayer-stones – but feeling suspicious of my emotions, it was my impulse to hope that I wasn’t being fooled by some new craze. I told myself that the whole display would be vindicated by one old stone, even if the rest was just a modern echo. And of course the truth I chose was the one I liked best; the one in which the deeply knuckled fingers of St Senan or St Onchu had slipped across this landscape, conjuring fresh Christian spiritualities in defiance of pagan warlords.

Away from the prayer stones, the heart of this ruggedly brick-stiff landscape is richly vegetative. The Burren has been described as Ireland’s botanical ark; everything’s here, and in a randomly selected space of six feet squared, you might find thirty or forty different species of plant. It’s actually helpful to discover that as they set seed or roll back into the shallow soil for the winter, they become almost completely unidentifiable. Specific identifications feel unimportant against a wider, almost overwhelming impression of diversity – while I could point out certain patches of crane’s bill and hawkbit, I could only stare in shocked ignorance at most of what I saw. Sure, there’s grass – but it’s widely dispersed between other things – and all the while overhung by the rigging of cobwebs; knapweed like shattered scaffolding and the neverending junk of cow parsley. In the brightness of a summer’s day, this place would be a wonderland for the neat taxonomist. In its sudden decline towards winter, it’s open to wider and more general appreciation; spurning formal nomenclature, I’d prefer to call it crazy paving scented with undermould and the lapsy ribbons of grass.

These stonefields are a cattle place, and down in the valleys where hazel woods erupt like stubble on the chins of these hills, there is an atmosphere of steam-soaked bellowing. Cows are brought up from the softening fields at the end of October, and the Burren itself functions like an enormous outdoor shed. All the backed-up summer’s grass is available to be eaten then, and the heavy beasts lie out for the storms in comfort, sheltered by dykes and strands of withered bushes. In the old days, this kind of wintering for cattle was so highly prized that animals were walked all the way to Clare from Limerick and Ballinasloe. In a landscape of pilgrimage and sainthood, the movement of beasts is littered with ritual and holiness – it’s a participatory custom to ring with Seamus Heaney’s understanding of Ireland as the fulcrum between the sacred and the profane; how even a shitty old beast can represent a species of contact with further devotional shores.

Nowadays there are sheds and slurry tanks which anchor cattle closer to home, and wherever cows are moved it’s usually to the sound of squeaking aluminium trailers. Times change, and much as I’d imagined the distant roaring beasts belonged to the ancient Queen Medb or the “slow and blue-eyed oxen of Finn”, old droves are all but dead these days. It’s all gone modern – but local farmers still value this winterage for the love of the place and the sake of itself. There’s no question that grazing improves the wealth of plantlife here in the limestone hills. Scientists reckon that eighty percent of the plant species found in Ireland are here, and many found here which are not found anywhere else. It’s all tied to cattle, and a cycle of movements between seasons which runs back in time for thousands of years – sure it’s diminished by modernity, but stubbornly powerful for the thread of itself. Even the squeaky Ifor Williams trailers are consecrated into the tradition now; like prayer stones thrust into gaps in the warmth of last summer past.

Out on a long hill road, fresh mist rose from the sea and crowded through the doubled-down thorn trees, bringing dew to a few surviving flowers of pink crane’s bill. Spots of rain fell, and facing into the wind, grey crows took off and landed around the bodies of sleeping cattle. There were hare tracks in the foggage; clusters of snails scattered around their favourite plants as if they’d fallen in gouts like a leak from a sack. I watched meadow pipits creeping and squeaking along the dyketops, and I thought that it must be a powerful place for larks in the summer.

Then in a broken-off downstroke of whistling, a dear familiar sound came up from the low cloud and the huge luminescence of sunlight which glowed in the mist like light shone out through a papershade. It took a moment to find them against such a grand enormity of water-weighted sky, but there was no rush. They were circling in a vast loop overhead, sometimes dropping down to dyke-height but more often hanging up high like fronds of tinsel. And soon my binoculars caught them; three golden plovers in the sand and low colour of winter plumage. People say they’re plain in the winter, just as the Burren is said to be rocks and nothing more.