Burren

(Local Name: Boirinn) The Burren (Boirinn, "Great Rock"), halfway along the Irish west coast, is an extraordinary tract of karstic country on the south side of Galway Bay, a flat tableland of unfolded carboniferous limestone strata rising in stages above the coast. When Cromwell's soldiers came here they are said to have complained that there were "too few trees to hang anyone on, too little water to drown anyone in, and too little earth to bury anyone in."

It is worth taking some time to explore this lunar landscape, with its rounded hills of porous gray rock and its barren terraces, its little streams which seep away in the scarred surface of the land, its underground rivers, caves and swallow-holes, its