Introduction To say that the Burren is a karst landscape of glacial limestone in north Clare would be like saying that hurling is a stick-and-ball sport played in Ireland. Neither statement is wrong – both are
factually irrefutable – but both miss the spirit, the soul and the passion of the people who live here (and who fervently follow the sport). It was the people and their passions I went in search of over three seasons of the year: spring, summer and autumn.
At first glance, the Burren seems a rugged, desolate place, the kind of landscape – both literal and
metaphoric – that takes a special kind of organism to survive there, let alone thrive. But linger awhile
and you will notice that an astonishing variety of life has found niches and crevices in which to do just
that. And just as a mixture of Arctic–Alpine and Mediterranean plant species have been swept here by the forces of nature, so too have a diverse array of people settled in and around the Burren. One chef
said it best: ‘There have been people on the Burren as long as there have been people in Ireland.’ They have always made their lives and their livelihoods in connection with the health of the land.
From Dublin and London, Sweden and France, from Finland and from the north Clare land their
families have lived on for centuries, they have come to the Burren. Like those seeds scattered by the forces of nature – relying on their own tenacity to survive – they have found a crack in the crag, put down roots and been nourished by the soil and spirit of their surroundings.
The names and faces and stories in this book are of the people of the Burren who create food in
the Burren. It’s a place that has been renowned for the quality of its produce for as long as people have cared about what they eat.
Tudor banquets of King Henry VIII are said to have been stocked with Pouldoody Bay oysters,
where cold limestone-filtered water enters the salty tidal flats of Galway Bay. Cromwell’s general Edmund Ludlow infamously said of the Burren in 1651 that ‘it is a country where there is not
enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him’. What has been forgotten, however, is that he continued by lauding the quality of its lamb and the fatness of
its cattle, attributing this to ‘the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two- or three-foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone’, that is ‘very sweet and nourishing’.
Even to this day, heads of state and visiting royalty are served organically farmed salmon smoked
in Lisdoonvarna. Ireland’s first pub to earn a coveted Michelin star happens to be in the Burren.
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