Big ideas in the Burren . . .

When the Burren College of Art recently announced a new Dean of Possibilities no one batted an eyelid. Why not a dean of possibilities? In a land as old as the Burren, every possibility eventually becomes reality.

There’s a movement growing in the area of people reimagining new roles for themselves in this age-old environment. A backward-looking sense of forward planning. Farmers turning into tour guides, software developers becoming bakers: an experiment in social engineering.

The art college was founded 20 years ago in the courtyard of a 16th-century castle by a local man, Michael Greene, who saw it as a natural continuation of the learning tradition established by the old Brehon and Bardic schools of the 6th century and the monastic settlement of Corcomroe. Since then they’ve lured hundreds of, mainly American, artists from their city studios to “the rugged strangeness of this rocky place”. They are now experimenting with the idea of becoming a hothouse for creative thinking: mixing artists with lawyers, scientists and business people to challenge them and spark new potentials.

ExpandAutoplay

Image 1 of 7

Harry Jeuken with his BueLingo cattle, on his farm, near Mullaghmeen. Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons

A hothouse of any sort in the Burren may seem a strange idea but they cite the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s and Black Mountain College in North Carolina as inspirations – small, remote art institutions that had profound impacts on society.

The idea is to take people from one discipline, shake them up and redirect them. Most particularly, the Burren College of Art (burrencollege.ie) is keen to pry artists from the unhealthy introspection that pervades much of the art world and encourage them to contribute to society. Many others in the locality happen to be doing likewise.

Rory O’Shaughnessy, a stone mason visits schools to teach children how to carve bows and arrows from hazel, using shards of slate as arrowheads. He then makes them take aim at a basketball hoop, imagining it’s a deer up on a hill and if they miss it they won’t get dinner. The idea is to instil in them the skills of their hunter-gather ancestors. O’Shaughnessy claims his people have been here for two thousand years, so those ancestors are just like old cousins.

He works with Burrenbeo (burrenbeo.com), an organisation developing the idea of the Burren as a “heritage boot camp or Gaeltacht”, with locals providing immersive courses in the geology, archaeology, ecology and culture of the area. The Burren is a “learning landscape”, they say, the ultimate outdoor classroom. The concept of a heritage Gaeltacht might be considered pie-in-sky elsewhere, but the Burren could actually pull it off.

Burrenbeo have already been running a 20-week ecology programme in schools for a decade and 900 children have received certificates of Burren expertise, proving among other things that they can shoot a home-made arrow at a deer if required.

The weekly farmer’s markets of Kinvara and Ballyvaughan is like a vice den for these new imaginative free-thinkers. There are hawthorn-ketchup makers, bagel bakers, creative book-binders and the usual scattering of cheese and vegetable sellers selling their wares, and not just to an affluent elite or other blazing-eyed social pioneers, but to regular locals, while trad musicians play, as if honouring the indigenousness of the food with local tunes.

At the Kinvara market there’s an imposing septuagenarian selling bags of herbs who looks for all the world like a reincarnation of Biddie Early, the notorious necromancer of east Clare. This it turns out is Granny Fahy – mother of some the area’s most radical social entrepreneurs. Her family have farmed at New Quay by the Flaggy Shore for 160 years and for centuries before they farmed land nearby. Her bundles of wild leaves are grown by her sons Colm and Donnacha, who have a thriving organic vegetable business.

Another son, Roger Fahy, inherited the dairy farm with his wife Bríd and knew they had to either expand it, diversify or die. “There was no way we could expand as there was sea on three sides of us,” says Bríd. “We were walking animals to grazing as it was, we were even swimming them out to an island to feed them on. This was not sustainable.”

So, they began to think creatively and came up with Linnalla Ice cream (linnallaicecream.ie) which appears wonderfully indifferent to the tyrannical hegemony of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.

“The interesting flavours came from being on such a tight budget, and vanilla is so expensive – over €80 a litre,” says Fahy. “I had three children, so I sent them out picking blackberries instead. The first flavour I ever did was rhubarb and custard, because rhubarb happened to be in season.”

Linnalla ice cream is now available in gorse, sloe, sea buckthorn, hazel and rosehip, depending on the season. “In farming you always follow the seasons, so it’s only natural that you’d follow the seasons in ice cream.”

Three years ago they set up a café on their farm and to make sure visitors really appreciated the area they started sending them out on walks with binoculars, information sheets and picnics of Burren food: St Tola’s cheese, Burren Smokehouse salmon, etc.

If children forage enough wild harvest while out walking to make a batch of ice cream they get a free scoop on their return. When I ask Bríd if her strong environmental awareness is unusual, she says, “The people here in the Burren are pretty grounded, we are all rooted in nature, in the landscape – it’s just our wady.”

Another of Granny Fahy’s sons, Carl, was a software programmer in Canada until he heard the call to return to the Burren and tried developing a range of edible seaweed. His experiments in preparing a three-course seaweed meal proved too pioneering and he turned instead to creating an indigenous Burren bagel. “I was trying to emulate a NY bagel at first, but I’ve now developed our own tradition, a genuine Galway Bay bagel, with aspects of the European bagel tradition which dates back to the 14th century.” Was Granny Fahy’s soda bread not good enough for him? He is quick to point out that “bagels are not a bread at all, as they are leavened in water, not air.”

Still, why go to the trouble of making them here? “A bank manager in Gort told me that it’s typical of people along the Atlantic coast to be self-sufficient. An isolated rural area like ours has always needed to be self-employed, harvesting both the land and the sea.”

He sells his bagels only to locals at a few markets. “I’ve done Dunnes and the shops, but you put a bagel in there and it might be still on the shelf four days later. It just doesn’t interest me. I like to get my bagels to the market within two hours of the oven.” Just like in the old days.

Certainly, people have a sense of the continuity of tradition here. Harry Jeuken, a Dutchman, has farmed his patchwork of small one-acre, stone-walled fields since 1973. He claims his holding is an original Celtic farm, unchanged for thousands of years. Jeuken is part of a farmers’ cooperative, Farm Heritage Tours (farmheritagetours.com), which offers visitors a chance to explore the landscape with the people who know it best.

“The Irish round towers are stone antennae built by the Celts to capture cosmic energy,” he explains within minutes of greeting me. ‘If you stand underneath a round tower and look up you’ll see the energy bursting out of it.” He explains to tourists who come visit that “the inside of a round tower is similar to a flute, the six windows are like the six flute holes. They create tones, energetic frequencies.”

Initially the plan for Farm Heritage Tours was for the farmers to act as assistants on tours led by archaeologists or botanists, but it soon became apparent that the farmers had a far more profound sense of the place.

Frank O’Grady, another farmer in the scheme, explains that during the boom years they were advised to modernise and mechanise: his father was told to bulldoze some mounds and walls to increase his holding. Later O’Grady himself was advised to use the stones in the mounds to fill trenches. Now, he realises these mounds are in fact Neolithic remains that within a morning’s work could have been wiped out forever. “We have inherited an ancient and unique system that links us directly to pre-historic Burren farmers,” O’Grady says.

That they can afford to preserve the old practises is down to the Burren Farming for Conservation Programme (burrenlife.com) which offers small government payments for conservation works such as clearing scrubland, building stone walls and improving water quality.

“Without traditional farming practises the Burren will not survive,” says Dr Brendan Dunford, who spent a decade researching the area and developing the Programme. Hazel scrub has already covered 15-20 per cent of the grazing land since the decline of traditional agriculture. Each field now gets scored annually on its biodiversity and water quality, so that the farmer’s actual work gets rewarded as opposed to passive setaside schemes.

Farmers have supported the rather proscriptive programme because it recognises their expertise and allows them decide how best to achieve the goals. Already half the designated land of the Burren is included in the programme, and it could easily be extended throughout the region if the Department of Agriculture made more EU funding available.

Whether the stagnant local economy and the flow of rural depopulation can really be overcome by fresh thinking remains to be seen, but already they are attracting some remarkable people to the area. Ross and Karen Quinn travelled throughout Asia, South America and North Africa before setting up Vasco restaurant and eco-adventure centre (vasco.ie) right by the coast at Fanore. The idea is to create an entry point for mountain climbers, cliffs walkers, cyclists, cavers, surfers and day-trippers. Vasco even offers shower facilities and storage lockers, clearly influenced by places abroad.

The food is the best of Burren produce: the Fahys salads and ice creams, St Tola cheese, Burren smokehouse fish and produce from Harry Jeuken’s farm – but is heavily influenced by the Quinn’s travels: Burren lamb cooked Tangier-style for five hours, Caribbean goat curry, Lebanese flatbreads and for breakfast banana nut hotcakes with vanilla bean, date and pecan butter! Maybe the area’s greatest strength is the community’s willingness to work together and blend the old with the new. It’s a subtle form of social engineering and if you want to see how it’s working check out next weekend’s Winterage cattle drove (burrenwinterage.com), where the characters mentioned above will gather together with the wider community to mark the ritual of herding cattle up to winter pastures – a tradition known as winterage.

Farmers, priests, community activists and social pioneers will walk the cattle to the limestone uplands in a living tradition that has continued since Neolithic times. If you want to understand the Burren there’s no better place to start.