The Burren Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
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 01Which 1980s fantasy film used the Cliffs of Moher, beside the Burren, as its Cliffs of Insanity?
The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride. The Cliffs of Moher stand in for the Cliffs of Insanity, though almost all the rest of the film was shot in England, much of it in Derbyshire.
Q 02What does the Irish name Boirinn, from which "Burren" comes, mean?
Rocky district
Rocky district is the sense of the Irish boireann, which dictionaries gloss as rock or rocky country. Medieval monks took a kinder view: they named their abbey in a green Burren valley St Mary of the Fertile Rock.
Q 03Pol an Ionain, a show cave on the Burren's western edge, is famed for one of the world's longest what?
A stalactite
A stalactite: the Great Stalactite hangs free from the roof of its chamber. Two cavers found it in 1952 after a long, difficult crawl.
Q 04Which island group is a geological extension of the Burren's limestone hills?
The Aran Islands
The Aran Islands belong to County Galway, but their rock is Clare's: the Burren's limestone runs on under the sea and resurfaces as the islands' fissured pavements and endless stone walls.
Q 05In which geological period did the Burren's limestone form as sediment in a tropical sea?
Carboniferous
Carboniferous. Well over 300 million years ago this part of Ireland lay just south of the equator under a warm, shallow sea, and the shells and corals that piled up on its floor hardened into the Burren's limestone.
Q 06What are the flat slabs of limestone pavement called, as opposed to the fissures between them?
Clints
Clints are the slabs; the cracks between them are grikes. Rainwater widened natural joints in the limestone into those fissures, whose shelter and moisture let ferns and wildflowers grow out of bare rock.
Q 07The Caher is unusual among the Burren's rivers because it does what?
Stays above ground to the sea
Stays above ground to the sea: it is the only river that crosses the Burren's limestone on the surface. Everywhere else rain sinks into cracks in the rock and travels through caves, so the hills have almost no streams.
Q 08What rock caps Slieve Elva, the highest hill in the Burren?
Shale
Shale. Dark shale once buried the whole Burren and glaciers stripped it from the limestone almost everywhere, but Slieve Elva kept its cap, so the highest hill in a region famous for bare limestone is not limestone at all.
Q 09The Burren is a classic example of which landscape type, named after a limestone plateau in Slovenia?
Karst
Karst is the German form of Kras, a plateau behind Trieste where such scenery was first described. Rain slowly dissolves the limestone, leaving caves, sinking streams and enclosed hollows with no outlet.
Q 10Granite boulders on the northern Burren pavements were carried by ice from which region?
Connemara
Connemara, across Galway Bay: an earlier ice sheet pushed south over the bay and dropped its granite on the limestone. The last ice came from the north-east instead and left mostly limestone boulders behind.
Q 11Alpine and Arctic flowers grow in the Burren side by side with plants from which warm region?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean. Flowers of the high Alps bloom here almost at sea level beside southern species, and lime-loving plants grow next to acid-loving ones, an unlikely mix that has made the region famous among botanists.
Q 12Which vivid blue flower, native to the Alps, grows wild on the Burren's limestone?
The spring gentian
The spring gentian. At home in high Alpine pastures and very rare in northern Europe, it surprises visitors to the Burren by flowering almost at sea level.
Q 13Which flower family has over 20 Burren species, among them bee and butterfly kinds?
Orchids
Q 21Which Bronze Age treasure was found in a Burren rock crevice?
A gold collar
A gold collar: the Gleninsheen gorget, made around 800 to 700 BC and now in the National Museum. Like most of its kind it was bent in two before being hidden, probably to take it out of use for good.
Q 22Stone-walled ringforts, hundreds of which dot the Burren, are known by which name?
Cashels
Cashels, from the Irish caiseal, a stone fort; the earth-banked kind found across most of Ireland is a rath. So many survive on the Burren that archaeologists read them as proof of a sizeable farming population in early medieval times.
Q 23Roughly how old is Caherconnell, the well-preserved stone ringfort beside Poulnabrone?
1,000 years
Orchids. More than twenty kinds flower on these thin limestone pastures, helped by grazing cattle that clear away the tough grasses and leave room and light for wildflowers.
Q 14The Burren green, found nowhere else in Ireland or Britain, is what kind of creature?
A moth
A moth, Calamia tridens, with pale green wings. Widespread in central Europe, it was unknown in these islands until a collector found it on the Burren's limestone grassland in 1949, and it has turned up nowhere else since.
Q 15The Burren is one of Ireland's main breeding areas for which elusive mammal?
The pine marten
The pine marten held on in western strongholds like the Burren when it had become rare across Ireland. As it spreads back, it is credited with driving down the invasive grey squirrel, to the native red's benefit.
Q 16When do Burren farmers traditionally move their cattle up onto the limestone hills?
In winter
In winter, the reverse of hill farming almost everywhere else. The dry limestone hills go on growing grass, so cattle graze them from October to April, and their grazing clears the way for the spring wildflowers.
Q 17Which Cromwellian general said the Burren lacked water to drown a man, wood to hang one, or earth to bury him?
Edmund Ludlow
Edmund Ludlow, second-in-command of Parliament's army in Ireland, set the saying down after marching through in 1651. He added that the cattle were nonetheless very fat, because the grass growing between the rocks was so sweet.
Q 18Poulnabrone dolmen is what type of monument?
A portal tomb
A portal tomb: two tall portal stones flank the entrance beneath the great capstone, and a low mound of stones around the base helped to brace the uprights. The chamber was in use some 5,800 years ago.
Q 19What did 1980s digs find under Poulnabrone dolmen?
Many people's bones
Many people's bones: the remains of more than twenty adults and children, placed in the chamber over about six centuries along with a stone axe, bone jewellery and pottery. One was a baby buried there far later, in the Bronze Age.
Q 20Which type of megalithic tomb makes up most of the Burren's prehistoric burial monuments?
Wedge tombs
Wedge tombs went up around 2500 to 2000 BC, in what seems to have been a boom time for the Burren's farmers; in the centuries that followed, the population appears to have dwindled.
About 1,000 years: digs date the fort to the 10th century, so it is medieval, thousands of years younger than the dolmen up the road. Its owners were still putting up a new building inside it some 500 years later.
Q 24Corcomroe Abbey in the north Burren was founded around 1200 by which monastic order?
The Cistercians
The Cistercians settled a green valley among the bare limestone hills, and the abbey's old name records the contrast: St Mary of the Fertile Rock.
Q 25Which clan ruled the Burren from Gregans Castle until the mid-17th century, its chief styled "Prince of Burren"?
The O'Loughlins
The O'Loughlins held the Burren from their tower house at Gregans, princes in name but subjects in fact, since the far mightier O'Briens of Thomond were their overlords. Their dead lie beside 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
Dysert O'Dea: Richard de Clare was killed, and his widow burned Bunratty Castle and fled. The kingdom of Thomond then stayed out of foreign hands for more than two centuries.
Q 27Where did Máire Rua ("Red Mary"), who reputedly wed a Cromwellian officer to save her lands, live?
Leamaneh Castle
Leamaneh Castle, where she and her husband Conor added a four-storey mansion to the old tower around 1648. Folklore heaped wild legends on her, but the records show she simply lived on there for decades.
Q 28What is unusual about Newtown Castle, a 16th-century Burren tower house?
It is round on a square base
It is round on a square base: the tower rises as a cylinder from a pyramid-like footing. It was restored and reopened in 1994, under a new oak roof, to serve the newly founded Burren College of Art.
Q 29Farmer Jack McGann discovered Aillwee Cave in the 1940s while doing what?
Following his dog
Following his dog, which had chased a rabbit into the hillside. He went only a short way in and kept the find to himself for some thirty years; cavers explored it in 1973 and it soon opened as a show cave.
Q 30The bones of which animal, more than 10,000 years old, were found in Aillwee Cave in 1976?
Brown bears
Brown bears, long extinct in Ireland, seem to have slept out their winters here: besides the bones, the cave floor still shows the shallow pits they scraped out as beds. It has been called Ireland's last bear den.