Monday, August 03, 2009
AS every Irish schoolboy, and schoolgirl, knows, the Burren is one of Europe’s most distinctive landscapes, with a plant life and heritage dating back 6,000 years.
This unique area, in counties Clare and Galway, is the focus of research by scientists and €1m is to be spent there each year, for the next three years, to support high environmental value farming, with a tourism spin-off. Wonders never cease in the beautiful Burren, and something new is being discovered about the place all the time. It can be safely assumed, nevertheless, that every schoolboy did not know about the latest discovery in relation to the area’s ancient history.
Botanists from University College Galway (UCG) have used a most unlikely source – fungi that grow on cattle and sheep dung – to shed new light on farming, fado fado, and its impact on the Burren. Using old and new techniques, involving the study of fungi that grows only on cattle and sheep dung, they can show how farming waxed and waned over the past 3,500 years and how this shaped the Burren’s extraordinary plant life. Their findings are published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology. Dr Ingo Feeser and Professor Michael O’Connell, both from UCG, collected peat and soil samples from upland areas of the Burren. Peat, because it preserves pollen, holds secrets and records of past plant life. But scientists have only recently realised that peat also preserves other fossils, such as fungal spores from dung thousands of years old. By using both these techniques and radiocarbon dating, Feeser and O’Connell have uncovered the history of upland farming in the Burren, and the major role that cattle and sheep grazing has played in shaping the area’s plant life and landscape.
Prof O’Connell said: "Spores from fungi that grow on dung of cattle and sheep are really useful for two reasons: they preserve well, and, since they are produced at ground level, they stay put. That means when we find them as fossils, we can be sure that grazers were present at the sampling site all those years ago." All that information helps distinguish between the impact of factors such as climate change and upland grazing on life in the Burren.
It has been revealed, for instance, that pinewoods once grew on the exposed north-western Burren hills that slope towards the Atlantic, on the southern side of Galway Bay, until around 500BC, when increased farming by Iron Age peoples resulted in pine no longer being the dominant tree.
Prof O’Connell said: "Present-day open pinewoods, on limestone soils in Scandinavia, with a ground flora that includes many typical ‘Burren species’, are the closest analogy to these former pinewoods on the coastal Burren uplands."
The study also highlights the dynamic relationship between humans and nature in the Burren, since farmers first arrived 6,000 years ago. While open pinewoods dominated coastal uplands, hazel scrub was important in inland areas such as Corkscrew Hill, where there was more intense farming activity. When farming declined at the end of the Iron Age (about AD 300), hazel replaced grasslands in what the researchers refer to as the ‘Late Iron Age Lull’.
The reverse occurred in the late 18th and early 19th century, when population levels rose dramatically and the Burren became bare.
That contrasts with the present situation, when farming is on the decline and the spread of hazel reduces the habitat available to the typical Burren plant life, and hides the rich archaeology of the region.
The name ‘Burren’ denotes a rocky place, but the Burren landscape did not always have a surface like the moon.
According to Prof O’Connell, not only was there large-scale clearing of woodlands by early farmers, there was also substantial soil loss through erosion.
It’s now acknowledged that the Burren, as a fragile landscape, is in need of protection and conservation.
Numerous people and organisations have been welded into a single force, the Burrenbeo Trust, to do precisely that.
Farming practices that accord with the needs of the environment are being encouraged.
The nearby Cliffs of Moher, seen by almost a million visitors each year, were recently shortlisted, among 28 natural landscapes, in a competition to identify the seven wonders of nature.
The spectacular cliffs, home to one of the major colonies of cliff-nesting seabirds in Ireland, rise to 214 metres at the highest point and extend for eight kilometres.
The attraction also has a sophisticated visitor centre, using the latest visual and audio equipment.
Designation as a wonder of nature would undoubtedly boost the drawing power of the cliffs. Ironically, however, a problem for those responsible for the Burren could be the control of visitor numbers to protect the landscape from a tiny minority that damages some of the monuments and plant life.
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