Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him, and not enough soil to bury him.  So claimed a henchman of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, describing the Burren region of western Ireland as British troops scoured the land searching for rebels to the Crown.
           Lesser known is the rest of the Cromwellian’s observation:  “And yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth…that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing."
           Barren and bleak, bustling with life, the Burren is a place of contradictions.
           The Burren is a 150 square mile region in County Clare, Ireland, famous for endless stretches of flat, rectangular limestone surface bedrock reaching to the horizon in all directions, tumbling into draws and scaling the low-lying mountains.  Its name, appropriately, derives from an Irish word, "Boíreann," meaning “a rocky place.”
           But from the crevices (called grykes) between the slabs (called glints) grow a wealth of spring and summer wildflowers.  The flora includes arctic species hearty enough to withstand the cool, wet, wind-beaten winters as well as Mediterranean varieties that flourish in the rarely freezing Gulf-Stream-tempered climate.  In mid-April the yellow primrose and cobalt-blue spring gentium were beginning to make their appearance alongside the endless gray slabs.
           Bleak and treeless, the Burren holds an austere beauty.  A rain-soaked region, its water disappears quickly underground, channeled through the porous limestone, so that the surface itself is dry (in contrast to the bogs), except for seasonal valley pools called turloughs that disappear back into the ground in summer when the water table drops.  
           The Burren began to take its present shape during the last ice age, ending 12,000 years ago, when glacial sheets stripped away much of the overlying soil. Stone-age farmers further depleted the topsoil with erosional farming practices, clearing forests from marginal lands.  The limestone bedrock, now exposed at the surface, began to weather and crack in rectangular patterns. Since limestone is soluble over time, the cracks grew into crevices, and the remaining topsoil filtered into the spaces between the limestone blocks. 
           Remnants of stone-age (Neolithic) civilization still abound.  Nearly a hundred portal tombs dot the Burren landscape.  These tombs typically consist of two or three 6-8 foot tall limestone slab-walls set vertically, supporting a roof slab, giving the appearance of a tottering house of cards, although they have remained stable through 5,000 years of weathering.
           Likewise, the ruins of medieval Celtic Christian monasteries abound, both in the Burren proper and in its topographical extension onto the nearby Aran Islands.  While many Celtic monasteries found the Holy in bountiful surroundings like Glendalough beside a mountain lake or Clonmacnoise along the River Shannon, other monasteries—or monks at the start of their journeys—sought the Holy in remote, austere places.  As modern-day self-proclaimed Celtic monk Dara Molloy explains, monks would often wander before they settled down, “looking for their ‘place of resurrection’.”  They were inspired by the desert monks of ancient Egypt and gave place names like Disert and Dysart to the most austere localities. In the Burren and Aran Islands, there was little to distract them from their inward journeys.
           While Neolithic tombs and monastic ruins are tucked away in corners of the wandering back roads, the Burren owes its modern look to grazing cattle. If early farmers had destroyed their own nest, the lush grasses that grew in pockets and clumps among the stony slabs nourished the cattle that Celtic kings—and later Norman and British landowners—boasted as the essence of Irish wealth.  In turn, cattle kept the underbrush trimmed back which, left unchecked, might in time have covered the rocky expanse and perhaps built up a new soil.
           Even so, farmers didn’t give up the fight against the expanse of rock. Where the Burren meets the coast and on the nearby islands, Irish peasants scooped up handfuls of soil that had built up in the crevices, blended it with sand and seaweed, and carted the mixture to their small parcels of land amid the British landlords’ grazing estates.  Here, from the rocky, barren place, they built, inch by inch, the garden parcels that sustained them through centuries of indentured poverty. 
           But when the potato blight hit in the 1840s, disease destroyed away their main crop.  The British continued exporting the cattle while starvation and immigration carried away the population.  Today, the Burren’s population is still less than 60% of its pre-Famine level.
            The Burren is popular with tourists, although much of its traffic is en route to the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland’s most famous attractions.  The curious will stop to examine the Poulnabrone portal tomb. For a taste and smell of the old ways, many will stop in the peat-warmed pubs of nearby Doolin and Listoovarna for a pint and a bowl of Irish stew, staking out a nook amid meandering rooms. The evenings are filled with traditional music.
           But driving on the one-lane back roads in the off-season, you will encounter the day’s only traffic, a local tractor that will require you to back up 100 feet before one or the other of you can pull slightly off the road to let the other pass.  A guided hike across the stony uplands will reveal the first of the season’s wildflowers taking hold against the limestone pavement.  Your eye will sweep toward the turloughs that will disappear in summer like so much mist. Away from the touring buses, sheep and cattle guard the less-visited stony ruins of the ages.          
           The Burren is a study in contrasts.  Barren yet bustling with life, ancient and depopulated yet alive with Irish heritage, it doesn’t quickly reveal the full depth of its contradictions.  For that, you must look between the rocks.
 

           My first time through the Doo Lough Pass was by car, as I was still exploring the winding, ill-marked Irish roads.  The scenery was heavy.  An olive-colored bog draped off the twisted cliffs of the Mweelrea Mountains, whose peaks were obscured by mist. Patches of scree marked the steepest faces, or corries. 
          Doo Lough itself, by contrast, was lovely, a clear, cold glacial lake nesting between the mountains. [Lough, roughly pronounced as ‘lock,’ is the Irish word for ‘lake.’]
          And when I emerged past the southern end of the lake, a sign at the Delphi Lodge announced, innocently enough, “Fresh salmon for sale.”
          Which was somewhat ironic, given that the Delphi Lodge and Doo Lough Pass were the setting of one of the most horrific incidents of the Irish Famine.
 
          Nineteenth-century Irish rural life was precarious even before the Famine.  Absentee British landlords exacted a “pig for the rent” from Irish tenants who tended the landowners’ cattle and sheep.  In return, Irish families coaxed potatoes from small plots for their own subsistence.  The potato was the staple diet for 90% of rural Irish tenant farmers.
          The land required coaxing.  Naturally bogland, certain fields could be converted to small-scale farmland by digging deep drainage furrows and applying a fertilizing mixture of lime, seaweed, and manure to the raised soil mounds between the furrows.  Called lazy beds, these potato fields required back-breaking care.
          In 1845, a potato blight swept quickly through the Irish countryside, turning potatoes to mush in the fields overnight.  It was followed by another blight in 1846, and several more through 1851. 
          A million people in Ireland died of starvation and another million emigrated.  Western Ireland—the province of Connacht—was hardest hit with a 28% population loss during the Famine years.   
          (Heavy emigration continued through the following decades until the population of pre-Famine Ireland was nearly halved. Most of the potato beds since then have reverted to bog. You can tell which fields once nursed potatoes, though, where faint outlines of the lazy beds still run through the bog.)
          In March 1849, a crowd of 600 starving men, women, and children descended upon the new relief station at the town of Louisburgh, hoping for food or admission to the Westport Workhouse.  The officer in command said he could provide neither, and instructed them to walk instead the 11 miles through the Doo Lough Pass to the Delphi Lodge in hopes of relief. 
          As the time was late, the crowd slept on the streets of Louisburgh, and when a wintry night set in, 200 were dead by morning.  The rest began their walk to the Delphi Lodge.  No road existed yet, just sheep paths through the bog.
          When they arrived at Delphi the next day, the relief officers couldn’t be bothered from their lunch, and the crowd was told to wait.  Lunch completed, the officers then told them that no food was available, and they should return to Louisburgh.  Desperate, some turned to eating grasses from the bog, and died because human stomachs can’t eat what sheep do.
           The weather worsened again overnight as the people hunkered down in the Doo Lough Pass.  Sleet and heavy winds entailed, and 200 more of the ill-clad, starving people perished on the second night.
          The relief officer from Louisburgh could now feed some of the survivors, as there was work to hire out: the dead needed to be buried.  But there were so many dead and so little soil that most were buried in unmarked mass graves in the glens of the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          When I returned to Doo Lough, my plan was to walk a portion of the road from Louisbourgh to Delphi. I had considered fasting before I walked, but I didn’t. 
          In this second day’s light the Mweelrea peaks didn’t seem quite so threatening.  Sheep on the road, at the side of the road, off in the bog made the day feel lighter.
          I went off the road a couple of times myself, sluicing through the bog in my thoroughly water-proof boots, watching the water squelch with each step.  I wandered down to the pebble-shored lough.  So clear, slightly tannin-tinted.  When I stuck my hand into the lake I found it shockingly cold, and imagined a winter rain pelting down on the physically weakened.
          Two memorials mark either end of the Doo Lough Pass, one dedicated to victims of the Irish famine, and one to famine victims everywhere.
          The story of the Doo Lough Pass tragedy reached American ears, but especially those of the Choctaw tribe, who raised funds for Irish Famine relief in 1849, as the incident reminded them of their own Trail of Tears two decades earlier. In 1992, the Irish returned the favor, with a group walking the 500-mile Trail of Tears and raising $750 million for world-wide famine relief.  Each May a famine walk winds its way through the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          The first road through the pass was laid down in 1896, and today the road is handsomely black-topped.
There’s no news here that the roads we walk on were built by the labors and even the starvation of our forebears.  The least we owe the past is to get out of our cars.
          I don’t know whether today’s Delphi Lodge has any direct connection to the one of the same name from 1847.  Today’s lodge is part of the Delphi Adventure Resort, with bicycling, kayaking, and zip-wire opportunities.  It sounds like a lot of fun, and why shouldn’t it be?  We can’t live forever in yesterday’s tragedies. 
          But an odd observation stuck with me as re-entered my car and drove away.  When I was walking, the sheep hooves clattering on the road and the nearby rock outcrops sounded curiously like taps on my keyboard.  All those silent faces, munching on bog grasses, tapping, tapping out a story not their own but somehow written into their bodies.

            So what am I doing in Ireland anyway? 
            I have been writing about nature—really more about “place,” which is the intersection of the human story with the landscape—in the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi Valley for quite a few years now.  I have lived nearly all of my 50-some-ish years in Dubuque, except for a few years not far down the road in graduate school at the University of Iowa and a semester teaching abroad in Dublin.
            So what brings me to Ireland again, for nine weeks of nature writing?  With a semester abroad, nine weeks now, and a few other vacations and school-related visits, I will have “lived” in Ireland for about seven months, total.  Not enough to make me an expert about the land, but more than a vacationer, I hope.
            Even so, my goal is not to feign an expertise about Ireland, but to bring back fresh eyes with which to view my own home landscape.  And to sharpen my sense that all land is spiritual, all land is sacred.
            Now, Ireland does not look like the Midwest Driftless region.  Once in a while you hear non-native Americans say that their European ancestors—Irish, German, Swedes, you name it—“chose” to settle in this or that landscape because it reminded them of home.  For the most part, that’s wishful thinking. 
            Ireland, while sharing the Driftless’ summer green, is a land of immense stretches of water-soaked bog and stony sea-side mountains.  In the interior plains you’ll find, perhaps the closest visual similarities, but the farms support more sheep and cattle grazing rather than grain production, at least by way of comparison. 
            The similarities, for me, lie in what the landscapes evoke.  I’ll give you one such example.  Spiritual landscape, it seems to me, retains the story of those who have lived on the land and sometimes died there.  In Ireland I once bicycled out into the Wicklow Mountains well before “tourist season.”  I had the mountain roads all to myself.  I was a little spooked by the isolation—I had tire-changing gear with me, but the process isn’t fool-proof, and I’d have a long walk back to Dublin if anything went wrong.
            As I cycled the Military Road—so-named because the British built the road to patrol for Irish rebels through the centuries—I spied from the corner of my eye a small monument partway up a mountain side with a walkway leading to it.  Out of curiosity I dropped my bike and walked up the monument, only to find that it was a memorial to a republican IRA member whose murdered body had been found on that spot in 1923.  A victim of the Irish Civil War.  (I later found out that he had been present in the GPO in the 1916 Easter Rising.)
            His story was steeped in that place.  Yet his story was named and memorialized.  No less present were the stories of all those unnamed rebels, high-mountain sheep farmers, pilgrimaging Celts, and ancient Neolithic farmers who inhabited, traversed, or entered the land before him.
            I feel much the same in many places in the Driftless Land.  About two hours north of Dubuque on the Mississippi River, halfway between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse, is the site of the Black Hawk War massacre.   In 1832 Black Hawk had unsuccessfully led a band of Sauk men, women, children, and elderly to re-occupy their old home in Saukenuk (presently Rock Island) from which they’d been forcibly removed.  When “promised” reinforcements from other tribes had not materialized, Black Hawk tried to surrender, but that too went afoul when the military mistook the surrender for an ambush. Several battles and skirmishes ensued, but for the most part the Black Hawk “war” was a chase, with the military nearly always a day behind.  Now on the run from for over 500 miles and four months, the Sauk were starving and far north of their home.  They tried to return across the Mississippi River to where they’d been “removed,” but the military caught up with them at the river.  Army personnel and militia fired at the Sauk from shore and from a steamboat as they attempted to swim the river.  Some women had children on their backs, and they too were shot and killed.
            Out of 1500 Sauk who began the journey, only 150 survived.
            You cannot visit that place without feeling the story of what transpired there.
           
            But this brings me back to the original question: Why Ireland and why the Driftless?  This could be said of anywhere, right, that the land retains the stories of the people who lived and died there.  It could be said of Alabama and Spain for that matter.  And that is actually my point.  The Driftless is my home landscape, and Ireland my “adopted” one.  I won’t claim expertise about the Irish landscape, but by learning about it at more than at just a vacationer’s level I can bring home fresh eyes with which to know my own landscape.
            And when we stitch together landscape to landscape, place to place, and story to story, when we begin to understand that the land is spiritual, is sacred, then all of our landscapes become stitched together, and it becomes harder for us to tear them apart.
            So that is why I am here.
           
As I finish this “background” blog entry, I want to thank several individuals and groups: The anonymous Loras College alum and donor who has made the O’Connor Chair for Catholic Thought available to me and my colleagues before me; Loras College President Jim Collins and the rest of the administration who have been supportive in this quest of mine; my colleagues in the Language & Literature Division at Loras who have willingly picked up my duties while I’m away; and mostly to my family and especially my wife Dianne who lovingly embraced my project even as it sent me to Ireland, again, without her.
            Oh, and thank you to Skype and email, too!