Your first encounter can reveal it as an eerie, even ominous place. In its limestone fields there is little color, and the Burren picks up its character from the changing sky, which seems to be, after a while, part of the land. The sky can change on a breeze from blue to moody gray, to high rushing clouds black as rage, and then back to innocent sun once more, all in the space of half an hour. And so the Burren changes its shape and its emotion. Although it may look lifeless, it is not.
Rare plants grow from fissures in the limestone.
Arctic and Alpine flowers grow side by side, some botanists theorizing that this mystery is because of the Gulf Stream winds washing over Ireland. It is, most of the time, as quiet as a desert, and hiking through it under that huge amphitheater of changing sky produces a sense of time as a vivid, tactile object. It's no wonder the Cistercians came from France in 1194 and built Corcomroe Abbey as a place of meditation for the monks. Dry because most of the streams are underground, running through a vast honeycomb of caves. These are stone carvings of female figures, legs open, exposing their genitals unashamedly.