Interpretative centre controversies aside, during the past 20 years the number of houses built on the Burren had increased by almost 45 per cent, writer Tim Robinson told the ninth annual Burren Spring Conference at the weekend in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. Robinson, a writer in need of a distraction from the business of writing, set out in 1976 to map the Burren. Now, more than 20 years after its publication, he has completed a revised and updated version, which will also mark his farewell to mapmaking.
Describing the Burren as "150 square miles of paradoxes", Robinson acknowledged the area as a vast memorial to bygone cultures and asked: "How are we looking after it?" Erosion had done its work gradually enough, "traces of all previous stages showed through and added to the texture of the landscape", but clearly change was no longer the result of natural physical causes, such as rainwater or of cattle grazing. Centuries ago, farmers removed the natural woodland cover, which assisted soil erosion and enlarged the exposure of the underlying limestone.
Visitors are invariably struck by the lack of tree cover, but Robinson was referring to more deliberate damage than that caused by ancient farming practices combined with the passage of time. "Even before I first mapped the area in the mid-'70s, there had been large clearances of old field walls, swept aside with at least three known Stone Age tombs. In the 10 years from 1981, 4 per cent of the limestone area was `improved' into silage fields. Farm roads have been driven across the faint webs of prehistoric field systems on what were remote and silent uplands."
He was positive if cautious about the introduction of the rural environment protection scheme and the spread of the Burren National Park, suggesting perhaps both indicated "I hope, the end of the age of the bulldozer". The dangers facing the Burren by ongoing development were noted, but the emphasis at the conference was on researching and understanding what is a remarkable physical, historic and cultural heritage.
Archaeology was well represented by the contrasting styles of Dr Peter Harbison and Dr Paul Gosling, while George Cunningham, who has written extensively on the Burren, contributed a personable overview which looked to the literature, geography, local history and everyday life of this part of north-west Clare. The presence of Mary-Angela Keane, a Cork-born geographer and farmer who has lived in the Burren for 38 years, gave a sense of the intimacy acquired by someone who knows the place well yet can still remember coming to it as a stranger. The attendance at the Burren College of Art was as diverse as the poetry of Yeats and John Betjeman, which were called upon to describe the beauty of the Burren. Several art students are currently in residence here. A glimpse of the Middle Ages was provided on Friday night by Newtown Tower House, whose round tower-like structure sits on a square moss-covered base, beyond which the college buildings extend.
Sensitively restored by a local man, Michael Greene, who runs the art college and assembled a team of masons and carpenters to save the tower house, it was restored in 12 weeks. It took nine tonnes of oak as well as the labour of specialist craftsmen to re-create the tower.
Archaeologist Paul Gosling examined the impact of aerial photography on archaeology and the way it has assisted the reading of the landscape. George Cunningham reminded his listeners that Ireland had supplied three valuable words to the geographer's vocabulary: turlough, esker and drumlin. How true it is that among the many beauties of the Burren is that most fleeting of features, the turlough or disappearing lake.
