Within minutes of meeting Shane, I realized this wouldn’t be like other guided walks I’d experienced. As I savored tea and scones slathered with clotted cream and jam, Simon phoned Shane’s Burren Hill Walks and arranged a half-day ramble up Black Head. A sheep and cattle farmer whose roots here go back, “acch, forever,” Shane Connolly earned a diploma in archeology from the National University of Ireland, another in local and regional studies from University College Cork, and has a passion for sharing not only book-learned facts but also oral tradition. “You want Shane,” said Simon Haden, owner of Gregan’s Castle Hotel, an elegant Irish-Georgian manor, tucked in The Burren’s folds, just below the acurately named Corkscrew Hill, in Ballyvaughn. This time, I wanted to understand the landscape, learn about the culture, and identify the flora and fauna. My first visit to The Burren, I’d explored randomly, aided neither by accurate map nor informed guided. Marked and unmarked roads weave by castles and holy wells, ancient forts and penitential stations in a landscape that’s equally barren and foreboding, yet spiritual and inviting. Perhaps, but it’s also a place of mystical, almost magical, beauty. A general for Oliver Cromwell, who invaded Ireland in the mid 1600s, described The Burren as “a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.” Gaelic for “a rocky place,” these terraced and treeless, silvery-purple-hued hills crown a subterranean skeleton, a limestone labyrinth of caverns and winding passageways carved by water over thousands of years. The Burren isn’t quite the antithesis of emerald green Ireland, but it’s close. Now you need to know that, because that’s the way we work in Ireland.” And with that, he handed me a walking stick and we started up the hillside. “Down there is Morocco, over there is Berlin. “The town is Murrough, in the parish of Ballyvaughn, in the old kingdom of The Burren, which is in the county of Clare, which is in the province of Ulster.” He pauses briefly, then gestured with his walking stick. Shane reeled off the answer, the words flowing together and punctuated by a thick brogue. There was no “You Are Here” marker in sight. I glanced around the small parking pullout, with ledges descending to Galway Bay on one side and a hill rising on the other.
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