The Burren National Park

Where it sits. The Burren occupies the northern third of County Clare and spills over into south Galway, a plateau of bare Carboniferous limestone running roughly from Ballyvaughan and Kinvara in the north to Corofin and Kilfenora in the south, with the Atlantic on its western edge at Fanore and Black Head. The name comes from the Irish boireann, a rocky place, and the description is literal: some 250 square kilometres of pavement scoured clean by ice, cracked into blocks called clints and separated by deep fissures called grikes. Rain drains straight through, so surface streams are rare and seasonal lakes called turloughs fill and empty through swallow holes with the water table.

The story behind it. The rock was laid down in a warm shallow sea about 340 million years ago; the shells and crinoid stems that made it are visible on any flat slab if you look down instead of out. Glaciers stripped the covering soil and left granite erratics stranded on limestone, and Neolithic farmers finished the job by clearing what woodland remained. Human occupation is unusually legible here because nothing has been ploughed away: Poulnabrone, the great portal tomb on the Ballyvaughan–Corofin road, was excavated in the 1980s and yielded the remains of at least thirty-three people buried between roughly 3800 and 3200 BC. Caherconnell, a stone ringfort a short distance south, was occupied into the medieval period and is still being excavated each summer. Corcomroe Abbey, founded for the Cistercians around 1195 and nicknamed the abbey of the fertile rock, sits in a hollow with carved capitals showing local plants, and Kilfenora keeps a remarkable group of high crosses, including the Doorty Cross, under a glass roof beside its ruined cathedral.

The flora. The Burren's fame among naturalists rests on an anomaly: Arctic-alpine and Mediterranean plants grow side by side, in the same square metre, at sea level. Spring gentian and mountain avens flower alongside dense-flowered orchid and maidenhair fern, the limestone acting as a storage heater and the grikes providing shelter and moisture. Roughly three-quarters of Ireland's native plant species have been recorded in a region covering barely one per cent of the island. The display peaks in the second half of May, and it survives because of winterage, an inverted form of transhumance in which cattle are put out onto the hills in the winter months and taken off in spring — grazing that suppresses coarse grass and hazel scrub and lets small plants through.

On screen. The Burren's best-known screen role is domestic rather than cinematic. Glanquin farmhouse, a plain two-storey house on the Kilnaboy–Carron road at the southern edge of the limestone, was filmed as the parochial house of Craggy Island in Channel 4's Father Ted (1995–1998); every exterior of Ted, Dougal and Jack's front door was shot there, while the interiors were recorded in a London studio, which is why the house never matches the rooms. The surrounding Clare and Aran landscape supplied the rest of the island, and the wreck in the opening titles lies not here but on the shore of Inisheer. The house is privately owned, visible from the road, and its occupants have long since made a modest business of serving tea to people who arrive singing the theme tune.

What you actually see today. The Burren National Park covers about 1,500 hectares around Mullaghmore, a whaleback of terraced limestone southeast of Kilfenora whose curved bedding planes look like contour lines drawn by hand; waymarked loops of two to eight kilometres start from the Gortlecka crossroads, with a seasonal shuttle from Corofin. Aillwee Cave near Ballyvaughan gives a straightforward underground walk past a bear pit that has not held a bear for several thousand years. The Burren Perfumery at Carron distils from local plants and keeps a good herb garden. Roadside pavement can be walked almost anywhere with landowners' goodwill, and the Burren Way runs 114 kilometres from Lahinch through the uplands to Corofin.

Getting there and timing. Ballyvaughan, Kilfenora and Corofin make the natural bases, all within forty minutes of Ennis and about an hour and a quarter from Galway on the N67 and R480. May and June are the point of the place; September gives clearer air and empty roads. Footwear matters more than anywhere else in Ireland — wet limestone is genuinely slick, and grikes are ankle-deep traps hidden under vegetation. Poulnabrone has a level gravel path and a car park; most of the wider landscape does not, and the national park's trails cross open rock that no wheelchair will manage.