The Burren
— — where the stone keeps a garden.
Not only on a wall.
“Two hundred and fifty square kilometres of limestone pavement in County Clare, west of the Shannon, south of Galway Bay. From the road the grey looks bare. In May spring gentian opens in the cracks, and Arctic and Mediterranean plants share the same metre of stone, which happens nowhere else like this. The Poulnabrone dolmen has stood on the pavement for nearly six thousand years. Edmund Ludlow, an officer under Cromwell, once called the Burren a country with no wood to hang a man, no water to drown him, no earth to bury him. They missed the garden.
The Burren, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Burren is a limestone karst landscape of roughly 250 square kilometres in northwest County Clare, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, south of Galway Bay and north of the Cliffs of Moher [Wikipedia: The Burren]. The name comes from the Irish Boireann, meaning great rock. Burren National Park sits at the centre of the region, about 15 square kilometres of pavement, hazel scrub, and turlough, the smallest of Ireland's six national parks [Burren National Park]. Since 2011 the wider area has been recognised as the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark, one of the first in Ireland. Villages on the edge, such as Ballyvaughan, Lisdoonvarna, and Doolin, sit where the pavement meets the road network from Galway and Ennis.
The pavement is Carboniferous limestone laid down roughly 330 million years ago, when this part of the world lay under a warm shallow sea [Geological Survey of Ireland]. Glaciers of the last ice age scraped the rock clean, leaving a near-flat plateau of horizontal beds. Rainwater has since dissolved the joints into deep parallel cracks called grikes, isolating the flat blocks between them, the clints. Erratics dropped by retreating ice still rest on the surface, including a famously balanced one near Poulnabrone. In the grikes, sheltered from wind and grazing, grow Arctic-alpine, Mediterranean, and Atlantic plants together, a floral pairing that no other place in Europe holds in the same way [Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark].
The wildflower bloom runs from late April through June, when more than six hundred species of flowering plants come up across the pavement [Wikipedia: The Burren]. Spring gentian (Gentiana verna) opens its sharp blue in May, often beside mountain avens (Dryas octopetala), an Arctic-alpine that has held on here since the ice retreated. The Burren in Bloom festival runs through May with botanical walks led from Ballyvaughan and Carron. Summer brings orchids: fly orchid, dark red helleborine, early purple. Evening light stretches long off Galway Bay. October and November turn the pavement quiet again, hazel scrub yellowing in the lowlands and the karst returning to grey [Burren National Park].