This Burren trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers about the grey limestone country of north County Clare: how the karst formed, why the flowers of the Arctic and the Mediterranean grow in the same grike, who built Poulnabrone dolmen, what a farmer's dog found at Aillwee, and which village Father Ted was really filmed in. It takes in the National Park and the UNESCO Geopark, the caves and turloughs, the tower houses and abbeys, and the villages around the edge: Doolin, Lisdoonvarna, Kilfenora, Ballyvaughan, Carron and Kinvara. It is written for people who have walked the Burren Way or driven the coast road, and for anyone planning to. Some questions are easy if you have been there; others (the geology, the medieval clans, the Cromwellian general who thought the place useless) will test even locals. The Cliffs of Moher, which sit at the region's south-western edge, get a couple of questions of their own. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and its cited sources before publishing. Play it, share your score, and argue about whether Kinvara counts.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Burren is a karst landscape centred in which part of Ireland?
County Clare
Geologically the limestone runs on into south Galway, and the village of Kinvara there is often counted in.
Q 02What does the Irish name Boirinn, from which "Burren" comes, mean?
Rocky district
The Cistercians who built Corcomroe Abbey there called it St Mary of the Fertile Rock, which is not the same thing.
Q 03Roughly how large is the Burren, as measured within the circle made by Corofin, Gort, Kinvara and a fourth village?
About 530 square kilometres
Depending on the definition, estimates run from 250 square kilometres of bare pavement to 560 including the downland.
Q 04Which island group in Galway Bay is a geological extension of the Burren's limestone hills?
The Aran Islands
Ferries to the islands leave from Doolin on the Burren's western edge.
Q 05In which geological period did the Burren's limestone form as sediment in a tropical sea?
Carboniferous
The rock is roughly 325 million years old and holds fossil corals, crinoids, sea urchins and ammonites.
Q 06What are the flat slabs of limestone pavement called, as opposed to the fissures between them?
Clints
The fissures are grikes; they hold moisture and shelter ferns, orchids and dwarf shrubs.
Q 07Roughly how many kilometres of cave passage have been mapped beneath the Burren?
Over 50 km
There are very few permanent surface rivers; most of the water runs underground.
Q 08What is the highest point of the Burren uplands, a shale-capped hill rising to 345 metres?
Slieve Elva
Its shale cap survived the glaciers that stripped the shale off the limestone almost everywhere else.
Q 09Roughly how many closed depressions with no surface outlet, known as poljes, does the Burren have?
Close to 100
The largest, the Carran depression, is more than two miles long, up to a mile wide and over 200 feet deep.
Q 10Granite boulders on the northern Burren pavements were carried by ice from which region across Galway Bay?
Connemara
The last ice sheet came from the northeast and left mostly limestone erratics instead.
Q 11Roughly what share of Ireland's flowering plant species are found in the Burren?
Over 70%
Arctic-alpine and Mediterranean plants grow side by side because of the unusual environment.
Q 12Which bright blue alpine flower is used by Fáilte Ireland as a symbol of the Burren?
The spring gentian
Late May is peak season for it, though the orchids bloom later.
Q 13How many of Ireland's 28 orchid species grow in the Burren?
23
That includes unique forms such as O'Kelly's spotted orchid.
Q 14Which moth is found nowhere else in Ireland but this region?
Q 21A gold Bronze Age gorget, evidence of a rich local elite, was found in which Burren townland?
Gleninsheen
Around the same era the climate turned wetter and much of the uplands' soil washed away, leaving the bare pavement.
Q 22About how many stone ringforts, or cashels, have been identified in the Burren?
Almost 500
That is out of roughly 45,000 in the whole of Ireland.
Q 23Caherconnell, the stone fort a kilometre south of Poulnabrone, was mainly occupied in which centuries?
10th to 12th
Excavators also found postholes of a far older Neolithic or Bronze Age timber structure beside it.
The Burren green
Of Ireland's 30-plus butterfly and moth species, only two are missing from the region.
Q 15The Burren is one of Ireland's main breeding areas for which tree-climbing mammal?
The pine marten
All seven of Ireland's bat species live there too, along with herds of feral goats.
Q 16Burren farmers famously reverse the usual seasonal pattern: when are cattle moved up to the uplands?
In winter
The practice, called winterage, has been going on since prehistoric times and keeps the scrub down.
Q 17Which Cromwellian general said the Burren lacked water to drown a man, wood to hang one, or earth to bury him?
Edmund Ludlow
He added that the cattle were nonetheless very fat, because the grass between the rocks was so sweet.
Q 18Poulnabrone dolmen is what type of monument?
A portal tomb
It dates from roughly 3800 to 3200 BC and is the best known of Ireland's approximately 172 dolmens.
Q 19Excavations at Poulnabrone in 1986 and 1988 found the remains of roughly how many people?
33
They had been buried intermittently over about 600 years, and one was a much later Bronze Age infant.
Q 20Which type of megalithic monument accounts for about 90% of the Burren's prehistoric burial structures?
Wedge tombs
Roughan Hill near Kilnaboy has several, including Parknabinnia and Creevagh.
Q 24Corcomroe Abbey in the north Burren was founded around 1200 by which monastic order?
The Cistercians
The abbey appears in W. B. Yeats' play The Dreaming of the Bones.
Q 25Which clan ruled the Burren from Gregans Castle until the mid-17th century, its chief styled "Prince of Burren"?
The O'Loughlins
Clan members were buried in the family tomb near the altar of Corcomroe Abbey.
Q 26In 1318 local clans defeated a Norman army led by Richard de Clare at which battle on the Burren's edge?
Dysert O'Dea
The region kept its Gaelic character and Brehon law schools long after much of Ireland had been Normanised.
Q 27Where did Máire Rua ("Red Mary"), who married a Cromwellian officer to keep her lands, live?
Leamaneh Castle
Her son later moved the family seat to the much larger Dromoland Castle south of Ennis.
Q 28What is unique in Ireland about the shape of Newtown Castle in the north Burren?
It is cylindrical on a square pyramidal base
Only about 30 of Ireland's roughly 3,000 tower houses are round, and none other has the pyramid base; it now belongs to the Burren College of Art.
Q 29Aillwee Cave was discovered in 1944 by a farmer who was doing what?
Following his dog, which was chasing a rabbit
Jack McGann kept the find to himself for nearly 30 years before telling cavers in 1973.
Q 30The bones of which animal, more than 10,000 years old, were found in Aillwee Cave in 1976?
Brown bears
It has been called the last bear den in Ireland; at the time only about 1,000 people lived on the island.