Free Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson

alternation between upland and lowland pastures , or rather the particular form of the custom that marks this region. For what I saw that day was the exact opposite of the ancient practice once general in western Ireland.
    The two seasons of the Celtic year were articulated by the movement of cattle and their attendants between winter quarters in permanent lowland settlements and the mountain pastures habitable only in summer. In Connemara, for example, the O’Flaherty chieftains and their retinue took up residence in temporary dwellings every May, and this custom of ‘booleying’ (from buaile , a milking-pasture) persisted among the peasantry until late in the last century, it being the womenfolk who spent the milking and buttermaking season in little huts of stones and sods on the hillsides while the men attended to the tillage, fishing and kelp-burning below. But the Burren is different. A spell of hot weather that would make the Connemara hills delightful will reduce the Burren’s uplands of thirsty limestone to waterless deserts; conversely in winter when Connemara’s hillsides are streaming quagmires , the Burren’s are relatively dry underfoot, and the Burren farmer can take advantage of the residual Gulf Stream mildness that plays around his land, and leave his cattle out of doors.
    Of course the visitor who drives into the region past its northern hillsides, which from a distance look like the flanks of giant salmon closely armoured with silvery-grey scales, or from the south along roads that cross square miles of the bare rock-sheets so aptly called ‘pavement’, must wonder how any human or animal could survive on what such a terrain has to offer, winter or summer. But as it happens the harder, purer limestones that take on such a hostile polish occur mainly on the lower and intermediate levels, and so make a disproportionate contribution to one’s first impressions, while the upper strata are of a dolomitic limestone , richer in magnesia, and break down into a light soil supporting a nutritious vegetation. Also, even the barest-looking areas have pockets of lush grazing here and there around the springs and seepages at the feet of the scarps that run across the hillsides.
    This pass that, crossed with a time-hallowed day, gave me a hint of the specificity of the Burren, is called Mám Chatha, the pass of battle, for history has penetrated it, as I shall tell. A walk that winds through it will supply themes enough for this brief evocation of a region that exceeds it in all dimensions. I begin at Turlough, the village south-east of it, and end at Lough Rask, to the north-west.
    A turlach is a hollow in which a lake comes and goes, not fed by streams but filling and emptying from below through openings in its bed as the general level of groundwater held in the fissured rock fluctuates in sympathy with the rainfall. Since the phenomenon is almost unknown outside the limestone region of western Ireland, the Irish term has been adopted generally, anglicized as ‘turlough’ on the natural but mistaken assumption that the second syllable has something to do with loch , a lake. The village is named from a fine example of a turlough, and there is another just north-west of it; between them they exhibit most of the strange features of this unusual landform.
    Since different plants can tolerate different degrees and frequencies of immersion, the flora of a turlough is arranged in zones that follow the contours of the hollow. Where a turlough is surrounded by hazel scrub the diminutive forest will stop short around its rim as neatly as if trimmed by a landscape gardener, and its inner face will be embellished with flowers of hawthorn, rowan and guelder rose. Slightly lower comes a contour line of ablackish moss with the musical name of Cinclidotus fontaniloides , which is diagnostic of periodic flooding. The grassy bowl within is usually well grazed and rich in flowering herbs; the common sorts of violet are replaced