Getting lost—and finding an idea in the Burren

After my initial discovery of the Burren, I returned home to New York but couldn’t get the place off my mind. Meanwhile, I continued corresponding with Peter Curtin at the Roadside Tavern in the Burren town of Lisdoonvarna. Peter invited me to come back and learn more about the Burren, to see if there might be a possibility of doing a book on the area and its influence on Tolkien and other writers. Some time later, I flew to Dublin, drove west to Lisdoonvarna, and found Peter waiting for me at his pub.

Born in an upstairs room at the tavern opened by his father, Peter joined the military, briefly tried college and left, and then became a fisherman in Galway before eventually returning to help run the tavern. (He and his wife Birgitta have expanded on it by opening, just down the block, an internationally-renowned salmon smokehouse.) It was sometime after his return to the tavern, in his late 20s, that Peter developed the habit of taking long walks in the Burren.

My third day there, I asked him to take me for a walk. He drove us to a favorite area and parked, and we set out walking down a rocky hillside. Big and barrel-chested, Peter walks with a heavy step in his worn hiking boots; he goes up and down inclines easier than most.

When he walks the Burren, he says, “I find myself not having consciousness of actually walking there. I’m so lost in thought, and things are bubbling up in my head.” He used the word receptive to describe his state of mind while walking. (At one point, I asked Peter, “Do you think you’re an especially receptive person?,” and he replied, “Yes, that’s the trouble.”)

As we walked, he pointed to the sunlit rocks around us. “Regular ground has no reflection, but naked limestone is crazy with reflection,” he said. The dynamic weather constantly changes the strength and angle of the light. “It’s like showing a movie on the ground.” And you can’t take your eyes off that ground for long, lest you misstep. While most of the stones are flat and smooth underfoot, the cracks (or grikes) between the stones must be crossed every other step. “You’re looking down and up, down and up,” Peter said, which means you’re constantly lifting your gaze and seeing the surroundings anew.

Into the woods we go

Peter led us down a rocky and sunny hillside until, eventually, we entered a small hazel wood forest. Now the ground was soft underfoot, the air cooler and sweet-smelling, and the light peeked through tree branches overhead; a very different world from the stark, bright limestone desert we’d just traversed. We stood quiet for a few moments. At one point, Peter quoted Tolkien: I walked into the nature world and I was part of the nature world.

Peter in the hazel wood forest

Something about the profound quiet in that hazel wood oasis, with the soft-filtered light coming through the trees, brought to my mind the Irish concept of “dreamtime.” I’d only recently learned about it in a book Peter lent me.

Dreamtime is said to be a special time and place when the barrier between nature and man seems to vanish and you suddenly find yourself, albeit briefly, feeling at one with the rocks and trees. I asked Peter, “When is dreamtime, exactly?” He said, “It’s whenever you hop over that stone wall and leave the world behind… and you’re back to the basic human that you are.”

What inspires artists about the Burren?

During my first full week exploring the Burren (I would later go back for more), I spent time speaking with local artists, including the Irish contemporary artist Richard Hearns and the painter Tiffani Love. I also visited a small art school, the Burren College of Art, that has sprung up on the site of an ancient castle in the heart of the Burren.

I asked the local artists what it was about the place that inspired them. They told me about the solitude one enjoys in the Burren; it’s quiet enough that you can hear your own inner voice. They told me about the mountains—majestic yet walkable. And the sense of history, all around in the form of ancient boulders, tombs and megaliths, and the still-standing ruins of abbeys that go back a thousand years. But most of all, they spoke of the limestone and the way it catches the light.

Does all of that limestone-reflected light encourage the other sort of reflection? I can’t say for certain, but I do think that in this environment, one tends to think and rethink—assuming one has a chance to do so.

My first few days in the Burren, I came nowhere near a state of deep reflection because I was too busy talking: interviewing artists, conversing with Peter Curtin, chatting up the locals (very easy to do in Ireland).

But round about the fourth day, Peter suggested it might be time for me to go off on my own and “experience the Burren as it should be experienced.” He planned out a full-day walk for me, providing a map that wasn’t much use because the rocky terrain where he brought me cannot be properly mapped.

We parked my car at a coastal lighthouse located at the base of a mountain, then Peter drove me a few miles inland and dropped me at a location that had an opening in a fence and a steep hill leading up to a rocky mountain (mind you, it was a different mountain than the one we’d parked my car below).

My mission, Peter told me before driving off, was to climb up this mountain in front of me, descend into a valley, then climb up again to an elevated pass that would cross over to a second mountain, and then descend that mountain to, God willing, find my car waiting for me at the lighthouse.

Almost immediately, I got lost

Having climbed that first hill, I soon lost sight of any path and ended up walking along a desolate mountain ridge. The view was spectacular—vast karst flatlands below—but also a tad unsettling, as there wasn’t any sign of civilization as far as the eye could see. I’d never before felt so alone in such a big place, and wasn’t sure I liked it. And I’d never before heard such quiet. A local poet/musician named Micheál “Moley” O’Súilleabháin had warned me that I’d experience “a world of stillness” in the Burren, owing in part to the lack of trees—no leaves to rustle in the breeze. “Sometimes,” Moley told me, “you may hear the skylarks’ faint twitter, bouncing off the rocks.” And, he added, if you hear a soft clomping on the limestone, it is probably the nomadic goats that inhabit these mountains.

As I edged along that narrow mountain ridge, wondering if anyone would ever find traces of me, I did, eventually, detect the sound of footsteps. I came around a bend in the ridge and saw the Nomadic Goats of the Burren coming my way, along the ridge. They froze as soon as they saw me.

Then there was something of a standoff: one of me and about ten of them, including a few little ones. All twenty or so eyes studied me warily. I know little about goats in general, to say nothing of the wild Irish kind; I wondered, might they ever use those considerable horns on people (especially people who get too close to their young)? There wasn’t enough room on this ridge for all of us and they didn’t seem inclined to turn around, so I did.

And it’s probably just as well, because in backtracking, I was able to gradually find my way back to the path that led down into the valley where, Peter had informed me, there were megalithic treasures awaiting.

I soon came upon a large cairn—a pile of stones—which, I later learned, had been in this spot and piled in this particular way for nearly two thousand years. Walking further on, I came upon a stone fort, meticulously assembled and mostly still intact after a dozen centuries.

Seeing all of this was stunning, but it felt more like a tourist experience than a creative journey. To use the terms of the environmental psychologists, I was experiencing “hard fascination”—as opposed to the kind of “soft fascination” that can encourage creative thinking. Between getting lost up on the goat-trodden ridge and then being mesmerized by the Stone Age surprises I encountered in the valley, I was just a little too engaged with my situation and surroundings—and therefore unable to drift into a more relaxed, reflective mental mode.

But in the second half of the day, all that began to change.

I climbed up out of the valley, ascending the second mountain. The view opened up and I could again see for miles—and I eventually spotted, in the very far distance, a tiny shape I recognized as the coastal lighthouse that was my ultimate destination. I reckoned it would take two or three hours—circumnavigating and slowly descending the mountain—before I’d get to my car. But now that I knew where I was going, I relaxed and settled into a rhythm, particularly as I walked on a level path of flat limestones (head down, head up). I passed only one other hiker along the way, but by now I was accustomed to being alone—comfortable with it, in fact.

There was a sense of being fully energized and alert, with no smart phone to do the navigating for me (because in this remote area, the mind may be receptive, but the devices are not).

I thought about my Irish grandfather, who emigrated to New York as a young man and died fifty years later, when I was a toddler. I envisioned him walking in the Burren (his family’s farm was located in a nearby village) and wondered what it must have been like for him to leave this dramatic part of the world behind for the wilds of New York City.

Eventually, I came around to thinking about why and how a place such as the Burren might foster creativity. From recent conversations I’d had with psychologists and creativity experts, I’d learned that being in certain natural settings for a good length of time can induce a relaxed and receptive mental state (known as “soft fascination”) that is conducive to creativity. Was I in that state now, as I walked the limestone and found my head flooded with ideas? 

Other questions quickly followed; my ideas have always tended to come to me initially in that form. Among the ones that surfaced:

What if someone actually analyzed and documented the mental experience of ‘soft fascination,’ as it occurs while walking in nature? And if one did that, might the documenter be apt to learn tricks and techniques that could enhance the experience—which could then be passed along? And where, exactly, did the Burren fit in all of this? Would this documenter of soft fascination be advising people that they had to journey all the way to coastal Ireland anytime they needed a creative boost? What if, instead, the Burren was held up as a model, an ideal version of something that actually exists in many places, including, perhaps, somewhere near where the reader of this potential book might live? 

At some point, a title popped into my head. I took a seat among the rocks and jotted down the words Find Your Burren in the little notepad I’d brought in my pocket.

The author sitting (uncomfortably) while jotting down an idea.

Over the next hour, I found myself pausing my walk every fifteen or so minutes, looking for a rock (erratic or otherwise) on which to perch and write notes. I found that the Burren does not have many forgiving places to sit; hence, one of the notes I wrote down was, Bring a small seat cushion—and there it was, the first practical tip that might be offered in that future book. More thoughts and ideas about the book flooded my head, and I became so distracted that I wandered off the path once again.

Eventually, I had to force myself to stop my mind wandering so that I could pay attention to where I was going until, at long last, I reached the lighthouse and my car.

That night, back in the quiet little cottage I was staying in, I was physically exhausted from the six-hour walk, but my mind was racing with more thoughts and a desire to start writing them into a narrative. I worked till the wee hours on the first parts of the first draft of what you are now reading.