Burren Bookmark

At first I thought I'd gotten up too late to visit the Burren, on the opposite coast. I'd had another restless night, so hadn't slept properly till after five. I had a late breakfast, said goodbye to Siobhán at around 1.30, then thought, why not? I didn't have to be home till late and, although Johnny thought I'd need hours to find a good location, I could always just take pot luck and see what happened.

I had wanted to return to the Burren to take some more pictures for a kind of ongoing (perhaps lifelong) fascination with the natural 'limestone paving' in that part of Co Clare, particularly the sculptural fissures in the stone called 'grykes'.

I first became interested in these in the late 1990s, when I noticed them on one of the Aran Islands, Inis Mór (the islands are geologically are part of the Burren). I returned to Inis Mór a few times, and also visited the Burren during the early noughties, where I took many photos, one of which was featured recently in The Guardian's series In Pictures.

The drive was smoother and shorter than I'd thought, and within 40 minutes or so I was officially in The Burren. I simply took the first left and drove onto one of those bony grey hillsides, parked then went for a stroll. I met a woman walking her dog who told me a good place for my purposes would be just over the hill, but after a 15 minute walk I realised that getting there would take too long, especially as I'd have to trek it back to the car. So I went back and drove on till I came to a roadside field which looked promising. I parked up a wee side road, keeping within a gateway without blocking it. Occasional cars passed, along with a herd of cattle. A shadow-fox trotted off into the corner of my left eye. Nobody bothered me, though I'd left a note on the dash just in case my car was in the way or some farmer didn't like trespassing tourist/photographers.

The locals here would be used to tourists anyway, the narrow roads continually bulging with buses. But one man wandering over the stones like a lost sheep, photographing -- what?

Grykes, fissures, microclimates, scrollwork of bramble, blottings of lichen, stone mouths, gums and teeth (a cracked rusting barrel perfect as dentures), sheep droppings, nova flowers, blackberries and blackberry leaves startlingly lime green against stone, creases and valleys, abysses, geological time loudly ticking, explosions of silence, ragwort bright as a blackbird's beak, Burren weather, bones of ferns or ferns bright as dinosaur crests, clouds of lichen, Henry Moorish angles, brainwork of stone, grey libraries, scattered sticks, bookmarks, punctuation, Burren I Ching.