Free Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson Page B

inclination . Only at the two ends of the upland area is there substantial folding or faulting; the giant steps with which the last hillside of Árainn descends into the sea are slightly warped and cleft by little rift valleys, while the terraced sides of Mullach Mór, a hill in the south-east of the Burren, are so curved as to make it look like a layer-cake that has sunk in the cooking.
    But it is on the nature of what is immediately underfoot, the broken stone of such hillsides as these around Mám Chatha, that the Burren’s paradoxical fame for barrenness and floral luxuriance is grounded. The limestone offers plants some very specializedhabitats, of which two form a strikingly complementary pair. Down in the grykes, as the enlarged fissures are called, all is shadowy, still and dank; ferns such as the hart’s-tongue and maidenhair thrive in this atmosphere from a Victorian bottle-garden. But the horizontal surfaces (the clints) between the grykes are dry and brilliantly sunlit, exposed to strong winds and searchingly grazed by cattle, goats and rabbits. Wherever a thimbleful of humus has accumulated some plant will root, of a sort adapted to these spartan conditions rather than to, say, the hurly-burly of a buttercup-meadow. Thus, close to the maidenhair fern, which is a plant of the mild, Atlantic side of southern Europe, one finds here species associated with severe sub-arctic or alpine climates, such as those two stars of the late May Burren show, the vivid blue spring gentian and the delicate, ivory-silk-petalled mountain avens. A profusion of the usual lime-loving plants, notably thyme, various saxifrages, eyebrights and orchids, occur on all but the barest surfaces ; even the most uncomfortable-looking rubble puts forth woodsage and the lovely burnet rose. Right next to these one finds plants such as heathers that prefer more acidic conditions colonizing deeper, better-drained pockets of soil from which the high rainfall has leached out the lime. Sheltered slopes of neglected land carry dense hazel scrub, and it is worth fighting one’s way through its outworks of bramble to see the miniature forest glades, dim, green, bewitched by moss and lichen, where wood-anemones flower virginally in the spring and the rarer broad-leaved helleborine more sophisticatedly in high summer. It is easy – but sometimes rewarding – to get bewildered and go wrong by 360 degrees, in such viewless thickets. When I was exploring around the turloughs described above, in the course of making my map of the Burren, I got lost in the hazel, and decided to work my way up slope to climb out of it. After an hour or so of disentangling myself from endlessly intricate snares, I emerged high on the hillside south of Mám Chatha at a point that would no doubt very seldom see a human being. There, something stirred in a bush ahead; I froze, and after a few minutes a badger came out to root and snuffle about in the rough grass. It took no notice of me as I stepped lightly after it, stopping when it did and waiting for it to move on, as if I were walking a wheezy lapdog in a park. When Iwent round ahead, it came within a yard of my toecaps before backing off with a throaty hiss of surprise, but then carried on foraging as before. Eventually I had to tear myself away from the occasion – and just a hundred yards farther up the hill found a grove of tall flowers that I did not immediately recognize; they were in bud, and I unrolled one enough to glimpse yellow within: Meconopsis, the Welsh poppy, never recorded in the so zealously botanized Burren before, and miles from any possibility of being a garden escapee. That was one of my best crossings of those hills; I flew down to Lough Rask as if winged with delight, and later I commemorated both encounters on my map, with a just detectably four-footed emblem of the animal, and the Latin name of the plant, secreted among my penwork clints and grykes.
    On another crossing of the same hills, I was groping