The Burren...County Clare

Philadelphia

For four days while I was in Ireland, I cycled through County Clare--in the area called The Burren.

I began the trek in the seaside village of Kilkee, progressively riding north, ending in the lovely coastal village of Ballyvaughan. I rode from village to village every day between the moonscaped Burren and the coastline rain or shine. ( If you waited for it to stop raining to do an activity in Ireland, you'd never get anything done.) The area is wild and astonishingly beautiful--one of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen.

As I waited for the plane to leave Dublin International, I found the following poem posted inside the terminal. Seamus Heaney, it turns out, knows The Burren, too.


POSTSCRIPT

And sometime make the time to drive out West
Into County Clare along the Flaggy Stone
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-gray lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of a flock of swans
Their feathers roughed and ruffling white on white
Their fully grown heartstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly.
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level, 1996