2021
Towards a Wild Ecology of Being c l a r e m u lva n y
Located primarily in the northwest of County Clare, the Burren is one of the world’s unique landscapes. The name means “great rock” in Irish (Boireann), and the place is dominated by thick successions of sedimentary rocks, often compared to a lunar landscape.
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ach step is a careful one, and a miraculous one. At foot level, wild orchids, the Spring gentians in pink and lighter pink, like dreams rising from a dreaming land, are dotted across the Burren landscape in effervescent rarity. From deep crevasses cut through the limestone, ferns and alpine avens are scattered between the slabs of rock, which at first and distance glance appear barren, but upon closer inspection yield a tapestry of yet more wild and soft bloom. “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/ Enwrought with golden and silver light . . . ” A W. B. Yeats poem comes to my lips. “ . . . Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” The cuckoos’ calls reverberate from the mountain face, a pied wagtail bounces by; then a pair of swallows dip and dive, cavorting above the limestone karran. This is a word I have just come to know, a word to name an ancient thing: the network of tunnels and grooves, markings and erosions on the limestone. Karran. The rock itself was laid down some three hundred-and-forty million years ago. Here I am being astonished by wind-song, and rocks older than I can think. “We are walking in a dreamscape,” I say to myself, and I feel the dream stir. *** The ecology of the Burren is both ancient and fragile. Alongside the spring fauna, six thousand-year-old dolmens reside; mere babies on the timeline of their context. Standing “erratics”—glacially deposited stones—are rising from the rock, in prayer or supplication. I do not know. Their presence tells of an older ecology from a time when the ice retreated and left them stranded. The rock itself is comprised of the compressed skeletal bodies of the marine life, from a time when the sea held this space. The waves of time have passed, leaving a fossilized quilt of memory. The land reads like a sacred text. “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” *** In ancient places we are all young bodies. May our footsteps be light.
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The Lowell Review
