The Burren, Co. Clare

A 250-square-kilometre limestone landscape on the Clare coast. Edmund Ludlow, Cromwell’s commander in Ireland in 1651, described it as “a savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him.” He was wrong on every count. Only 20% of the Burren is bare rock. The rest is grassland, scrub, coastlands, and seasonal lakes called turloughs that appear and disappear with the rain. Hidden in the cracks of the pavement, in microclimates the size of a hand, arctic and Mediterranean wildflowers grow side by side. Gentian, mountain avens, dense-flowered orchid. Species that exist nowhere else within a thousand miles of each other.