Cavan’s Burren is worth effort of restoring

A FEW days ago I happened to be driving along a small road in the limestone uplands of north Cavan, close to the Fermanagh border.

One of those brown signposts that indicate things of visitor interest pointed up an even smaller road heading north. It said ‘The Burren’.

Like most people, I’d always imagined the Burren was in north-west Clare, so the signpost was an irresistible invitation. In fact I have educated myself on the internet and discovered the Irish word ‘boireann’ means a stony place, and there are several of them in Ireland.

The one I stumbled across in County Cavan was fascinating. A Karst limestone plateau covering a couple of hundred hectares at an altitude of 250 to 300 metres. It’s on the watershed that separates the Shannon from the Erne and both rivers rise nearby. It belongs to Coillte because in the 1950s it was subjected to a terrible act of vandalism. Most of it was planted with sitka spruce and lodge-pole pine.

When I was there parts of it were closed to the public because felling operations were going on. Most of the remainder was a dense and mature forestry plantation. The fascinating flora that must once have grown on the limestone pavement had been reduced to mosses, liverworts and a few ferns struggling to survive in the deep shade.

But this place is still well worth a visit because, although the botany has been desecrated, much of the fascinating archaeology has survived. The Cavan Burren, like the one in Clare, attracted a colony of early Neolithic farmers. They found the light hazel and juniper scrub easier to clear than the massive lowland forest and their hut sites, field boundaries and some amazing tombs can still be discovered among the moss-covered boulders in the forest.

Exploration is made easier because signs and pointers have been put up. Many of the tombs have solar alignments – though the sun no longer strikes them – and there are some intriguing examples of ‘Atlantic Rock Art’ – abstract cup and ring designs carved into boulders by the first farmers.

It takes a little effort to puzzle out the details because the prehistoric landscape is overlaid by artefacts from later times, medieval cattle shelters and nineteenth century rectangular field boundaries. But there are some useful tools on the Internet to help solve the riddles, particularly articles by Seamus O hUltacháin.

The destruction that was done to this place in the 1950s when the trees were planted is breathtaking. And it cannot be excused by saying that the authorities who planted the trees didn’t know what they were doing. There is plenty of printed material from the 19th and early 20th century pointing out its archaeological wealth and the plants had been surveyed in the days of Praeger, and before that.

I wondered if it could ever be restored. The forested area is not that large and the timber is not that valuable. If the trees were felled carefully, removed and the stumps allowed to rot would the limestone pavement reappear from the moss and be colonised by the plants it should be growing and the insects they would support?

Such a restoration would have to be done very sensitively, but I don’t think it would be that expensive.

In the meantime if you want to visit this extraordinary landscape – which I thoroughly recommend – it is 3km south of the village of Blacklion in Co Cavan, just north-west of Cuilcagh Mountain.

* [e-mail]