‘For if delight may provoke mens labor, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with Orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels?’
John Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes (1597)
Ireland
May 2013
The next day dawned wet. I’d spent the night at a youth hostel in Canterbury amid a coach load of Dutch school children and had woken early, eager to get out before the onslaught on the canteen.
I spent the morning exploring the cobbled streets of Canterbury, ducking into small shops and independent cafés that on a sunny day would be bustling with people. Outside the cathedral, I watched as bedraggled American tourists handed over their fresh bank notes, their ‘I heart London’ T-shirts hidden beneath coats and umbrellas. The weather was grim, and I was relieved that I had made the effort to squeeze in the Lady Orchids the evening before, as photographing them in the rain would have been cold and dissatisfying.
I’d decided to gamble on a return to Ireland to have another go at finding the Dense-flowered Orchid. Thanks to the late spring, it would still be flowering and I was determined not to fail so early in the season. To increase my chances of success I enlisted the help of Sharon Parr, the BSBI county recorder for County Clare, who had provided me with directions on my previous visit. During our conversation on the phone, it became clear that there was no guarantee we’d find one, but it was worth risking another return flight.
So that evening, I flew from Gatwick to Shannon, for the second time in as many weeks. I paid a jolly Irish taxi driver an extortionate amount of money for a short drive from the airport to the small town of Sixmilebridge. I had booked a B&B for the next two nights based on the optimistic assumption that I’d only need a day to make my find.
As the taxi pulled away into the darkness, I turned to the brash red door, its paint peeling like bad sunburn. There were two doorbells mounted on the wall so I pressed the first, listening to the dull chime as it echoed off the walls inside. Nothing. I tried the other and stepped back with shock as a static shriek erupted from the intercom. Despite this racket, no one came to the door. Slightly concerned, I tried both bells again, to no avail. It was eleven o’clock and I didn’t really want to press the doorbell again; I was aware that other people would probably now be cursing from their beds.
Casting around for options, I noticed a pub further down the road: Casey’s. Warm golden light spilled out onto the pavement. On entering I was met by stony silence and staring locals. The only movement came from the hearth, where a log fire flickered. In a voice that sounded more confident than I felt, I asked after the owner of the B&B. I half expected him or her to be here, enjoying a pint of Guinness at the end of the day. The landlady took one look at me before helpfully suggesting I try ringing the doorbell.
I returned to the B & B, and while I was trying to work out what to do, still knocking and ringing at the door, I suddenly remembered that I’d scrawled down their phone number the night before. I could hear ringing inside as I held my phone to my ear. At least I had the right number. It rang eight times, then a shuffling sound and a muffled Irish accent: ‘Hello?’ ‘Hi, I’m booked into your B&B for the night but no one seems to be answering the doorbell,’ I replied, relief escaping into my voice in ripples. ‘Oh right.’ The shuffling sound again. ‘I’m standing outside the door right now…’ I hinted. A pause. ‘Oh…’ More shuffling. A further ten seconds passed.
Then the door swung open, releasing a blast of warmth and revealing one of the oldest men I’d ever seen. He was stooped over, a stained grey jacket hanging limply from his spindly frame. Wisps of white hair did little to cover his mottled scalp. He let me in. The air was stale and reeked of cigar-ettes. I glanced around the gloomy hallway, floral wallpaper decades old; a wooden desk with a white doily poking out from underneath a cascade of pamphlets; and a single musty armchair backed up into a corner under the stairs as if attempting to fade into the shadows.
The elderly man looked at me blankly so I explained that I had booked a single room for two nights. Another few seconds went by. Then something seemed to dawn on his face and he led me upstairs, taking the steps at a sloth-like pace.
When we eventually reached the landing, he looked quizzically at me again and then, before I could stop him, he proceeded to throw open all the doors along the corridor. Suddenly alive, he crashed into each room, then shuffled out again. Some were clearly occupied. At last, he found my room. Saying goodnight, I made sure I turned the key in the door before going to bed.
Early Purple Orchids in their thousands welcomed me back to the Burren like an old friend. Two weeks older and they were showing their age. Pinks and purples were fading and many were crisping into brown spikes.
After breakfast, I’d taken a train north to Gort where I’d bought myself provisions for the day then headed west into the Burren. It was a beautiful day, in stark contrast to my last visit. The walk to Lough Bunny and the National Park was a pleasant ten kilometres along tiny roads bordered by rough limestone walls, pieced together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle and muffled with hibernating hedgehog-like mosses. Wet fields full of bogbean, a dainty white flower deserving of a prettier name, were soon succeeded by grassy meadows littered with large glacial erratics.
I passed Kilmacduagh monastery, a ruined abbey near Gort founded by St Colman mac Duagh in the seventh century. St Colman was a religious recluse and spent many years living and praying in a cave in the Burren. Beside the monastery is an Irish round tower, rising like an oversized pencil from the graveyard. Bizarrely, the doorway to the tower must have been seven or eight metres above the ground. There were several backpackers with large rucksacks marching up the bumpy track to the ruins, covering their mouths and noses as passing cars sent up clouds of white dust. The round tower, supposedly the tallest in Ireland, leaned noticeably, as if burdened by centuries of tourists, pilgrims and exposure to the Irish elements.
In the distance, where the grey flags crumbled into silver rubble, there was a lone tumbledown stone cottage, a relatively rare sight in this part of the island. Throughout the western counties of Ireland, cottages like this stand deserted and crumbling, a hard reminder of the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, when funerals were commonplace and church bells rang across the countryside, mournful and morose. In the worst-affected towns and villages, where there was no one strong enough to dig individual graves, the dead were piled up and buried in large holes where the soil was loose and crumbly. Many died in their tiny cottages. Their homes would be their graves.
Such ruins are rare in the Burren, though, because the people here were so poor that they couldn’t afford to build themselves houses using their own stone. While I and many others appreciate the wild beauty of the Burren, for many the place will remain forever tarnished by this dark period in Irish history. The poet Emily Lawless described the Burren Hills as ‘skeletons – rain-worn, time-worn, wind-worn – starvation made visible, and embodied in a landscape’.
The sun was high in the sky now and I was beginning to burn. The countryside had lapsed into the familiar limestone pavement that I’d encountered two weeks previously, and there was very little shade. I had arranged to meet Sharon near Lough Bunny. While waiting for my lift, I began exploring the wet, tussocky grassland at the eastern end of the lough. A whitethroat began chirring from the top of a hawthorn. I stood still among the bright-yellow marsh marigolds and watched this little warbler sing its scratchy song. As I neared the lough, I spotted a single Early Marsh Orchid: pale magenta with a pinched lip of twinned loops and dots. The inflorescence was crowded with flowers, all desperately seeking the attention of passing pollinators.
The Early Marsh Orchid is so variable that it has been subcategorised into five different subspecies. Some, like the bright-red coccinea variety or the pure, white rarity ochroleuca, are easier to identify. Others, notably the one in front of me, are more difficult. It looked like the pulchella variety, derived from pulchellus, meaning ‘beautiful’ in Latin. But the Harraps suggested that this one is largely restricted to southern England. My dilemma didn’t last for long, however; emerging from a thick clump of deep-jade reeds was another Early Marsh Orchid, this time with paler, flesh-coloured flowers decorated with squiggles of rose and flamingo pink: subspecies incarnata. The Early Marsh is quieter, more delicate and less showy than the other marsh orchids. Easily overlooked, it never forms the swarmed ranks so typical of its close relatives.
I wandered back along the road, occasionally jumping across to the limestone pavement to look for plants. Spring gentians still flecked the grass with bright-azure blue and the mountain-everlasting had burst into bloom, a scattering of clustered white flowers. Bloody crane’s-bill poked out from the grykes, its dark-pink heads reminiscent of the marsh orchids. The air smelled sweet and summery.
I sat by the water’s edge and gazed out over the lough, enjoying the light breeze and soft rippling of the water as gulls wheeled in the air above.
The Burren landscape has been inspiring poets for generations. W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Seamus O’Sullivan have all written about these hills. In the constantly changing weather and shifting light, the Burren unfolds intimately as you pass through. Sudden showers, sharp bursts of sunshine and scurrying clouds transform the rugged landscape of limestone, ancient ruins, stone walls and meadows.
I was already experiencing its draw, after just a couple of days here. How can a place be so barren, yet so fully alive? So empty, yet bursting with interest? There is a sense of completeness; the kind experienced when all the components of a machine or a plan come together in perfect harmony. It clicks. The Burren is a memorial: it remembers the dead in its stone tombs; it remembers the water that has been slowly wearing it down over millennia; and it remembers the passage of poets, botanists and everyone else who has been inspired by its wilderness. Sitting there by the lough, I was filled with feelings too difficult to name.
A screech of tyres behind me brought me to my senses and I glanced over to see a grey Freelander that had pulled up at the side of the road. The window slid down and there was Sharon. She was in her forties, I guessed, wearing dark waterproof trousers, muddy from recent botanising, a khaki-green fleece and a hand lens looped around her neck. Now that it was obvious that Sharon was in fact a woman, I felt slightly ridiculous. Why had I thought anyone would name their son Sharon? Her voice, which had sounded so masculine on the phone, was clearly female.
I was so surprised and flustered that I tripped over my opening words, but Sharon was unfazed. We drove around Mullagh More to the same turlough I’d visited with Michael the week before. And, as we walked down to the shore, she explained that the Burren limestone was extremely flat and that Mullagh More, with its slanted layers of rock, was a rare exception. We climbed through a wall sprouting ferns and rue-leaved saxifrage and there, in front of us, was the very same grassy knoll where I’d spent half an hour searching fruitlessly for orchids only a week previously.
We split up and I quickly adopted plant-hunting mode, scanning the grass among the broken limestone fragments. And there, inexplicably, was a Dense-flowered Orchid. The search was over so quickly I’d barely had time to register it had started. The single plant, hiding amid the cottony tufts of the mountain-everlasting, was tiny. Its condensed head of creamy flowers were, as is typical of this species, all facing in the same direction. Each one sported a milky, dwarfed figure; smaller and more stunted than the Man and Lady Orchids, but a little person all the same.
What was particularly satisfying about this plant was that I had found it; to be shown it by someone else would have taken away most of the satisfaction, especially since I had already been to this very site. Annoyingly, there was an old spike next to it that had clearly been in flower on my earlier visit. I had been so close.
The Dense-flowered Orchid, or Magairlín glas to give it its Irish name, was a relatively late addition to our orchid flora. It was first discovered by Miss Frances More at Castle Taylor in May 1864, who reported gathering flowering spikes of a ‘very ugly’ orchid. She dried and pressed her specimens, sending some to the Natural History Museum in Dublin.
In Life and Letters of Alexander Goodman More, a biography of the naturalist A. G. More, Frances’ brother, we learn how Frances and Alexander botanised the countryside surrounding Nut-wood and discovered immature spikes of ‘an inconspicuous but evidently unfamiliar orchidaceous plant’. While Frances guarded the orchid, Alexander travelled to Dublin to meet Dr David Moore, director of the Royal Dublin Society’s Botanic Garden at Glasnevin, to propose writing an Irish flora. He writes that ‘the curious orchid now came into flower and my sister… collected and dried several specimens, remarking that the little orchis was something she had never seen before’. Between them, More and Moore decided that the plant was indeed the Mediterranean Neotinea intacta (a former name for N. maculata), and its addition to the British flora was announced by Dr Moore at the next meeting of the Royal Irish Academy. It has since been found across Ireland, mainly in the west of the country, in particular Clare and Galway.
Alexander More was the first of many botanists to express his surprise about its presence alongside alpine plants such as spring gentians and mountain avens, far removed from its Mediterranean heartland. Of all the mysteries surrounding the Burren’s bizarre flora, the most puzzling is how these species all got here. The distribution pattern for Neotinea is highly discontinuous and unlike that of any other Irish species – except, More noted, Arbutus unedo, the strawberry tree. Could there be a link?
As it turns out, Irish fleabane, St Patrick’s cabbage and the Kerry lily also show this restricted distribution split between the Iberian Peninsula and south-west Ireland. They are part of a small assemblage of plants known as the Lusitanian flora. It is a bio-geographical riddle. Sharon said one school of thought is that these Mediterranean plants migrated to Ireland after the last glaciation 12,000 years ago via wind-blown seeds. They could also be a relict flora left over from a time when Ireland’s climate was more aligned with that of modern-day Spain. ‘It’s unlikely that Neotinea could have survived so far north during an ice age, though,’ Sharon pointed out, ‘particularly along with its symbiotic fungus and associated pollinators.’ How and when the migration took place remains a mystery.
Some members of the Lusitanian flora, predominantly heathers, were shown to have been introduced to Ireland by the monasteries. This was a common practice more than a hundred years ago. Could monks have brought Neotinea over from Spain? And if so, for what purpose?
As Sharon and I walked around the turlough, I rang Michael back in England to tell him of the discovery. He erupted with laughter when I told him how close we’d been. We chatted as I wandered back through the limestone boulders, reminiscing about our time together. I updated him on my finds in Jersey and Kent. I was about to say goodbye when he stopped me as if he had something else to say. ‘Oh and Sharon… is she a man or a woman?’ I froze. Sharon was a step ahead of me and I was unsure whether or not she’d heard Michael’s booming Geordie voice. ‘Yep, she’s been extremely helpful,’ I countered. If Sharon had heard, she was doing a good job of pretending not to care.
In between the lemony shrubby cinquefoil and lilac heath dog-violets, we found more Early Marsh Orchids, but not the incarnata subspecies I’d seen earlier. These were the so-called ‘leopard orchids’, subspecies cruenta, that only grow at a handful of locations in Ireland and Scotland. The ‘leopard’ part was obvious: every part of the plant – leaf, stem, bract and even flower – was heavily flecked with dark-purple spots and blackened rings.
Through another wall we came across my thirteenth species of the year: a trio of Pugsley’s Marsh Orchids. Their flowers were remarkably similar to the other marsh orchids, but, like the Neotinea, they all faced in the same direction. It was as if there was something particularly fascinating to look at. Up until now I’d thought orchids were all attention seekers, but here I realised that it was the reverse: no matter where I sat, many of them would have their backs turned away like stroppy teenagers.
Back in the car, Sharon told me more about the geology of the area. The shallow layer of limestone is vast, stretching all the way from the granite of Galway to the Cliffs of Moher and the Atlantic Ocean. The Burren didn’t exist during the Carboniferous Period, 360 million years ago. In fact, nor did Ireland. Orchids hadn’t evolved yet. During this time, a warm tropical sea covered the part of the world where Ireland now lies, and in it lived innumerable microscopic marine organisms with skeletons composed of calcium carbonate. When they died, they drifted down to the ocean floor and formed a calcareous mud. Over geological time, as layer upon layer formed, the mud became rock, the limestone we see today. Given how unstable the Earth’s surface can be, the unmoved horizontal layers of limestone deposited more than 280 million years ago are testament to the stability of this area.
Despite our success with the Dense-flowered Orchid, Sharon seemed keen to show me some more of the Burren. She took me to Gortlecka Meadows, a collection of quiet grassy sanctuaries in the hazel forest. The Burren is famous for its dwarf hazel thickets, small pockets of spring that are the remnants of Neolithic coppicing. Three thousand years ago they would have provided pliable wattle for building fences and houses. These hazel spinneys have largely been abandoned for decades, left to reacquaint themselves with the wild.
Hazel was once a pagan tree, to be worshipped and treasured. To carry a hazel nut in your pocket was thought to be successful in preventing the onset of rheumatism, and the small buds, if eaten with dandelions, wood sorrel and chickweed, would cure colds and sore throats. It was also a May Day tradition to bring hazel twigs into the household to ward off evil spirits. Be warned, though, cut a branch of hazel for no reason and you would lose a year-old heifer.
We left the road and ducked onto a small path that disappeared enticingly into the hazel. It had been invisible just seconds before. Stepping through this miniature forest, with the canopy just above my head, felt eerie. The air was moist and mellow, the rocks mossy. Recent rain had formed a flash stream that had carved a channel deep into the path, depositing a chaotic flood of twigs and leaves. On either side, hazel branches hung low, heavy with spongy mosses and cupped lichens. They clung to the silvery bark, feathered arms drawing in moisture from the humid air. I’ve never been anywhere that felt so ancient. Centuries could pass and nothing would change.
We went through a gate made entirely from hazel, stepping around lady ferns, male ferns and hart’s-tongue ferns with their party-horn fronds. The bank ahead was a snow-drift of wild garlic. Suddenly something dog-sized and smelly exploded from behind a boulder with a shriek and scampered up the path. It was a goat. Sharon laughed as I wrinkled my nose at the smell. ‘You probably interrupted its private time,’ she joked.
Most of the goats in the Burren are no longer farmed and run wild, roaming from pavement to wood, through meadow and pasture. Sometimes they help keep the scrub at bay but more often than not their feeding habits do more damage than good. There is a heated debate among farmers about whether to manage the population, as they do with their own livestock so as to protect plant diversity. Traditional farming methods that have been in use for centuries are still maintained today. Many of these have been instrumental in forming the Burren as we know it. As ever, farming has the power to protect or destroy what’s special about the land it is practised on.
At the bottom of the hill, we hopped over a gate and out of the hazel thicket. Gortlecka Meadows sloped smoothly away from the trees, gentle and unassuming. It was yellow, pink and vibrant green.
We began searching in the grass while discussing my species tally to date. Sharon was impressed, and particularly jealous of my trip to Jersey. We had been walking for several minutes, through the most amazing array of spring wildflowers, when Sharon suddenly stopped. ‘Have you got Fly Orchids yet?’ she asked. I paused, the beginnings of my answer disappearing in the wind, as there in front of us were two freshly flowering Fly Orchids, side by side in the middle of the meadow.
Standing tall, and yet incredibly difficult to spot, their spindly stems carried the first of many camouflaged flowers. Like the Early Spiders I’d found on the Dorset coast, the Fly Orchid is one of the Ophrys orchids: the insect mimics. It has two wiry antennae that perch on its flower, surrounded by brilliant lime-green sepals. Its velvet body tends to be narrow and chocolate brown, with a silvery-blue band across its middle that imitates the sheen of an insect’s wings. It often grows in woods where little direct sunlight reaches the floor. Here at Gortlecka, though, the plants were right out in the open.
Just as the Early Spider isn’t visited by spiders, the Fly isn’t pollinated by flies. Argogorytes mystaceus is a digger wasp: thin, with an hourglass figure and a black body syncopated with narrow bands of yellow and gold. It looks very different from the Fly Orchid flower. So different, in fact, that you really start to question the wasp’s intelligence. How can it possibly be duped into thinking the orchid flower, whose appearance is only marginally insect-like, is its star-crossed lover? It turns out the flowers have gone for a slightly different strategy. They’ve paid less attention to how they look and invested more in developing the way they smell and feel. The scent, undetectable by the human nose, would be musky and meaty, a carbon copy of the pheromones emitted by the female. Each lip is covered in soft, silky hairs. To the digger wasp, the Fly Orchid is a sex toy, not perfectly life-like but able to arouse the senses and cloy the mind. It sates their sexual desires while they wait for the females to hatch, and in return they pollinate the flowers. Tit-for-tat.
It was after only a few minutes of sitting and watching that I realised we were being steadily surrounded by Fly Orchids, true masters of stealth and camouflage. They appear slowly and softly, shifting in and out of focus. The longer you wait, the closer they get. You’ll see one three metres away, yet remain unaware that one has crept right up to your knee. Over the years, I’ve realised that looking for Fly Orchids is a futile activity; their ability to vanish right in front of your eyes is unprecedented. Instead, you have to let them come to you.
With this success bringing me up to fourteen for the year, we continued to explore the Burren. Driving up the winding lanes, round corners so sharp they could only have been designed to keep tourist coaches away, I wondered what it would have been like to live here three or four thousand years ago.
Evidence of past inhabitants can be found scattered all over the Burren. ‘It’s equally fascinating from an archaeological point of view as a botanical one,’ remarked Sharon, ‘and you’d be surprised how often new sites are discovered, dug into pockets of the limestone pavement.’ You can find evidence of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Medieval settlements in close proximity to one another. The sheer number of burial sites is astounding.
We passed a Neolithic wedge tomb at the top of the hill, one of eighty in the Burren. A flat roof stone slanted across several upright boulders. I marvelled at the strength it must have taken to place it there. What kind of person had been buried below? A farmer? A hunter-gatherer? Had they been awestruck by the rocky landscape or simply taken it for granted, living their everyday life until it was finally over and they were left here, buried on the hillside? Perhaps they’d hated it, repulsed by bleak associations with hunger and hardship. Sharon pointed out that it was more likely the grave of several people. She gestured at another tomb on the horizon which, she said, dated back almost 4000 years. It was a burial site for six children and as many as twenty-two adults. Their remains had been found with numerous personal items: stone tools and simple jewellery.
We had reached the edge of the limestone pavement where the remaining patches of silver stone petered out through the grassland, like the last bits of snow that refuse to melt. I knelt down in the warm grass to admire a clump of twelve Dense-flowered Orchids that Sharon had come across the previous day. They seemed dangerously close to the road, constantly threatened by the swerve of a wheel. So small and inconspicuous, I couldn’t really blame myself for not finding them the week before. Each little floret was like a tiny vanilla ice cream laced with lemon and lime. Why do you choose to live here, I thought to myself, when you could be basking in the Mediterranean?
Further up the road, I found a few plants that had duller flowers, a band of pink running up the centre and pockmarked ovaries. These unhealthier-looking plants were of the variety maculata, which is much rarer in Ireland than the creamy-flowered specimens I’d seen already, but by far the commoner type in Spain and Italy.
I sat and enjoyed the sunshine, watching the beautiful white and roan of the shorthorn cattle as Sharon wandered further down the lane. I’d had a wonderful time in the Burren and felt privileged to have been there. I counted five more Dense-flowered Orchids – the creamy kind – marching in single file through the limestone. The juxtaposition of the vanilla flowers, pure and delicate, and the jagged clints; of fragility and extreme endurance, was humbling beyond comparison. I leaned back, soaking up the wilderness of the Burren as it tightened its hold on me, ensuring I would return one day, with so much more to explore.