Nature’s way: how a farm became a haven

Lifestyle  – Judy Murphy meets a couple who have developed a unique sanctuary for young and old in the Burren

Anybody who says you can’t be all things to all people hasn’t been to the Burren Nature Sanctuary, just outside Kinvara. It’s the brainchild of Mary Bermingham, who worked as an engineer during Ireland’s boom. When the recession hit and work dried up, she took a different route, and turned her 50-acre farm into a nature sanctuary so that visitors could learn about the flora and fauna of this landscape, which is unique in the world.

The result is a centre which hosts thousands of people every year from adults to schoolchildren and families.  Pathways through the farm allow people to explore, discovering wild flowers, rock formations and a lake which appears and disappears twice daily. This rich landscape also includes a doline, or collapsed cave, shattered limestone pavements, a pre-Famine village, an ancient round field, and indigenous woodlands. Visitors are welcome to explore all of them.

The Burren Nature Sanctuary has indoor and outdoor play areas for children, which are both fun and educational, while visitors can get up close with farm animals from pigs to goats to sheep and even Peruvian guinea pigs.

There’s also an award-winning café serving home-cooked food – much of it grown in the farm’s polytunnel.

Next weekend a new feature, the Burren Bubble, will be officially opened at the Sanctuary. The Bubble is a gift for anybody who wants to learn about local wildflowers and where to find them.

In this small bio-dome, horticultural expert Edward Dee has carefully planted a selection of flowers and herbs, either native to the farm or donated because they were under threat locally.

They have been replanted in groups as they’d be found in nature.  And so, plants from a limestone pavement area are all together in one section. In another, there’s an orchid-rich grassland. There’s also a wetland area. Another section has hazel and ash woodland, with samples of ash, hazel, oak and spindle. This space been designated the Burren National Botanical Collection by the London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International, as it’s an invaluable collection of the area’s rare plants, says Mary, while Edward points out the various species.

Carved into the Burren Bubble’s stone floor is a beautiful circular Celtic calendar and sundial. This 13-month calendar offers information about native trees, Celtic festivals and the year’s solstices.

This farm is home to a turlough or a disappearing lake, which vanishes twice a day. A replica model in the Bubble demonstrates how the turlough drains into an underground cave and then into the sea. Mary’s engineering background came in useful for designing this.

Turloughs are common in this limestone region, but the one on this farm is unusual because it’s tidal, which means that it empties and fills twice a day.

It’s fed by the Blackwater River which flows down from Derrybrien on the Galway-Clare border, reaching the sea at Kinvara. When the tide is in, the Blackwater backs up, filling the turlough’s basin twice daily in summer, explains Mary, who did a project on this for her engineering degree. The turlough is there constantly during winter, when it fluctuates in height.

London-born Mary came to Kinvara in her late teens while on summer holidays from college in London and, in her own words, she “got stuck”!

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.